Industry expertise

Insurance market research in India

Research on purchase journeys, agent channels and claims experience for insurers.

Quick answer

Market Research India is a specialist insurance research consultancy in India. We interview policyholders, agents, prospects in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Odia and English, with field teams in 50 cities and 4 methods matched to how this sector actually buys.

Proposal in 24 hours
Scoped, itemised and fixed-fee.
50 cities, 14 languages
Our own supervised field teams.
Senior-led, NDA-first
A research director on every project.

2,400+

Projects delivered

Cities with field teams

Industries covered

Indian languages

The decisions we help you make

Insurance in India is still largely sold rather than bought, and the agent sits between the brand and the customer. The claim is where the promise is either proved or broken, and one badly handled claim travels further than a year of advertising.

What stops people buying health cover?
How do agents influence choice?
How satisfied are customers with claims?
Is the barrier to health cover price, product comprehension, or a story someone heard about a rejected claim?
What would make a high-performing agent give you a larger share of their book?

We scope a study against one or two of these at a time. A brief that tries to answer all of them at once usually answers none of them well.

Who we talk to, and how we reach them

Who you talk to decides what the study can conclude. We treat each audience as a separate recruitment problem rather than as quotas in one sample.

Policyholders
Screened on policy type, tenure and whether a claim has been filed, with claimants deliberately over-sampled so the hardest part of the journey is heard properly rather than averaged away.
Agents
Recruited independently of your distribution team through IRDAI-licensed agent frames and professional networks, screened on licence status, multi-company status and annual premium written.
Prospects
Screened on category consideration and the absence of the relevant cover, with quotas on age, income and dependants, so the non-buyer's reasoning is captured before it gets rationalised.

Interviews run in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Odia and English, with every questionnaire translated and back-translated before fieldwork. Moderators and interviewers are briefed on the insurance category itself, not handed a script — which is the difference between a respondent answering politely and a respondent explaining themselves.

Methods that fit this sector

Method should follow the market, not the other way round. These are the approaches that fit how this sector actually behaves.

What a typical study looks like

Indicative, not fixed — but close enough to budget against before you have written a brief.

Indicative scope — insurance study

Typical sample: n=1,000 policyholders including a 250-respondent claimant boost, 150 prospect interviews and 40 agent depths across 8 cities
Who we interview: Policyholders, Agents, Prospects — each recruited against a separate screener rather than drawn from one general sample.
Core methods: In-Depth Interviews, CATI Telephone Surveys, Customer Satisfaction & NPS, Pricing Research
Fieldwork window: 4–5 weeks
Standard deliverables: Transcripts, Thematic analysis, Persona profiles, Daily progress
Signature output: A claims-experience index isolating the moments that destroy renewal intent
Lead time: 7–8 weeks from sign-off to debrief

Compliance, ethics and data quality

Research in this sector carries obligations that a generic fieldwork house will not have thought about. These are the ones we build into the protocol before the first interview is scheduled.

No policy or claim records collected
Interviews cover the experience, not the file. We do not ask for policy numbers, medical history or claim documents, and anything volunteered is redacted from the transcript.
Agent anonymity protected
Agents are told truthfully that responses reach you only in aggregate — otherwise nobody explains why they place business elsewhere.
Research is never a sales front
Respondents are told at the outset that nothing will be sold and that their details will not be passed to a distribution team, and we hold to that.
Verification you can audit
Every policyholder and prospect we count is screened against a written definition, de-duplicated, GPS- and timestamp-logged in the field, and re-contacted on a 10% back-check with 10% of audio audited by a supervisor who did not run the interview.

What we will not do on a insurance study

We will not substitute an audience without telling you, quietly loosen a screener to hit a quota, interview anyone who has not understood what they are consenting to, or move identifiable personal data outside India without your written agreement. If the fieldwork cannot be done properly, we say so at proposal stage rather than at debrief.

How we work

Our research process

01
Discovery
We turn your business question into clear research objectives.
02
Design
Sampling, method, questionnaire and discussion guides, translated into local languages.
03
Fieldwork
Supervised field teams with GPS, audio and back-check quality control.
04
Analysis
Statistical and thematic analysis by senior researchers.
05
Insight
Board-ready reports, dashboards and workshops with clear recommendations.

Where the sector concentrates

The Indian cities that matter most for insurance

Insurance is concentrated rather than spread: 0 cities carry most of the sector's weight, so we start there and add the metros that supply the rest of the demand. Each page covers insurance research in that city specifically.

Before you brief us

Frequently asked questions

What does a insurance research project cost in India?

Cost follows the sample, the seniority of the audience and the number of cities. Reaching policyholders costs a fraction of what it costs to reach prospects, so the audience mix moves the number far more than the headline interview count. Send a brief and you get a fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours.

Which cities should a insurance study cover?

Start where the sector concentrates — Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad — then add markets that match your distribution rather than the national map. Most clients run four to eight cities so results can be compared side by side.

How do you make sure respondents are genuinely agents?

Each audience has its own written screener and its own frame. Respondents are de-duplicated against past projects, fieldwork is GPS- and timestamp-logged, 10% are re-contacted on a back-check and 10% of audio is audited by a supervisor who did not conduct the interview.

How long does a insurance study take?

Fieldwork of the scope described above runs 4–5 weeks, and the whole project is typically 7–8 weeks from sign-off to debrief. Fieldwork usually begins five to seven working days after sign-off, once screeners and translations are approved.

Which methods suit insurance research best?

For this sector we most often use in-depth interviews, cati telephone surveys, customer satisfaction & nps, pricing research. The right combination depends on whether you need to size something, explain it or test it — a brief that names the decision gets a sharper design than one that names a method.

What safeguards apply to insurance fieldwork?

Interviews cover the experience, not the file. We do not ask for policy numbers, medical history or claim documents, and anything volunteered is redacted from the transcript. Alongside that, all personal data is collected on informed consent, held in India, pseudonymised before analysis and deleted on an agreed schedule, in line with the DPDP Act, 2023 and the ESOMAR code.

Sector at a glance

Hub cities: 8
Audiences covered: 3
Fieldwork window: 4–5 weeks
Lead time: 7–8 weeks
Proposal: Within 24 hours

See related case studies

Keep exploring

Insurance research, city by city and method by method

Fifty cities, twenty methods and the sectors that sit closest to insurance. Each page is written for that specific combination of market and approach.

Tier 1 metros

Full-scale quantitative fieldwork, viewing-facility groups and senior insurance interviews in the eight largest markets.

Tier 2 growth markets

Forty-two cities where insurance demand is forming fastest, each covered by a supervised local field team.

Show 34 more

Sectors that sit next to this one

These most often appear in the same programme as a insurance study, either as an adjacent market or a shared audience.

All other industries

The rest of the thirty sectors we hold dedicated field and analysis experience in.

Show 17 more

Next step

Make your next insurance decision with evidence.