NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 2006--According to a new Luxury Customer Experience Index survey (LCEI) from the New York-based Luxury Institute, USAA significantly outperformed its rivals in the Property and Casualty Insurance category. USAA was recently rated first as the life insurance brand that delivers "the best customer experience" as ranked by their high net worth clients. In the Property and Casualty survey, USAA earned a score of 85.5 while Chubb and American family scored 73.4 and 73.2 respectively.

High net worth clients rated 15 of the largest national property and casualty insurance brands based on their individual experiences. These included: AIG, Allstate, American Family Insurance Group, Chubb, CNA Financial, Farmers Insurance, GEICO, Liberty Mutual, Nationwide, Progressive, Safeco, St. Paul Travelers, State Farm, The Hartford, and USAA.

"The insurance industry is one of the most critical to high net worth consumers. Customer experience is the holy grail of brand performance and drives profitability, and, ultimately, the stock price. Today the results of the Luxury Institute's consumer-peer- review based impartial surveys are becoming a standard for measuring best customer experience for wealthy consumer purchasing decisions. Senior management, boards of directors, institutional investors and Wall Street analysts now use our surveys to benchmark competition on critical drivers, given their role as the objective and independent voice of this critical segment," said Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute. " The performance ratings of USAA demonstrates best practices in how to conduct business in the insurance industry and should be emulated by all customer-centric insurance executives."

This new survey, the Luxury Customer Experience Index (LCEI), creates metrics that capture the critical drivers for Customer Experience, as rated by each brand's customers, and goes far beyond traditional customer satisfaction measures. The LCEI delivers a critical set of metrics based on the four "pillars" of a customer's experience including: Experience Drivers, Price Worthiness, Customer Retention and Customer Referral for each brand in a category. The Experience Drivers section includes brand effectiveness, brand attitude, brand environment, and the brand's problem resolution index. For the LCEI the Luxury Institute surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 2,100 households with a minimum of $200,000 in gross annual income and minimum net worth of $750,000 (including home equity).

About the Luxury Institute

The Luxury Institute is the uniquely independent and objective research institution that is the trusted voice of the high net worth consumer. The Institute provides a portfolio of proprietary quantitative research that guides and educates high net-worth individuals, and the companies that cater to them, on leading edge trends, wealthy consumer ratings and rankings of luxury brands, and best practices. To reach the Luxury Institute, please call 646-792-2669 or go to www.luxuryinstitute.com.

Contacts
The Luxury Institute
Martin Swanson, 914-909-6350 (Office)
Cell: 914-715-3357
mswanson@luxuryinstitute.com
www.luxuryinstitute.com

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© Business Wire 2006