Tree removal by neighbour

Subsidence to a property as result of tree roots from a neighbour’s property is a real challenge. The tree(s) need to be removed – this work is critical to final claim cost as if the neighbour refuses to act insurers may have to pay for expensive underpinning work.

A letter is sent requesting property owner to remove their trees at their expense. Our challenge was to increase speed of initial response, and other factors such as willingness to fix the tree problem.

Our aim was to indicate the efficacy of behavioural interventions on communications to neighbours of homes suffering from tree damage, including the power of re-framing with no additional monetary help, versus the addition of monetary help.– both outcomes are valuable to show the direction to take that has the best outcome for business.

We left the external consultant’s reports alone that are bundled with the letter. We:

• Rewrote/designed current letter that requests tree removal – many pages and added info, of which part is shown below
• Rewrote/designed letter offering payment – In this way we could see how much of a difference giving away ‘free money’ helps – it may be a lot, or may not
• Rewrote/designed shorter letter that doesn’t have lots of info, just spurs them to call

We trialled these three versions along with the original letter in a working trial.

The redesigned Hunting Dynasty verison (N=92) performs better than the standard Control letter (N=179) in reducing time spent on a claim, both in first response time and conclusion time – mainly due to the behavioural interventions increasing positive intention from the recipient.