Discovery Health's Abysmal Customer Interaction Concepts

Interaction with Discovery Health is becoming exceedingly more inaccessible.

With more contact options available to members, one would be forgiven to naively think engaging with Discovery Health is simpler, effective and efficient. It is certainly not the case. Discovery offers a WhatsApp “Ask Discovery” chat forum, and the “Get Help service” and Discovery Chatbot available via their website and mobile app, and of course if all else fails, a call centre contact number.

All the interactive platforms are marvellous for one-liner, simple prepopulated database questions and answers but certainly not when it comes to more complex scenarios such as specific claim queries and such.

As a Discovery Health member, for the more complex queries, the preferred ease of engagement platform is email, not only important in detailing the message but also for record purposes. One would think Discovery health should, as a matter of business ethic support this need. Not so, seemingly email interaction is now reduced to a single one-way communication. Emails sent to these Discovery mailboxes revert using the same vanilla no-reply message – "Thank you for contacting us. Please take note that this is an automated reply and you will not receive a response to emails that are sent to this mailbox".

Also, medical claim emails no longer seem to be sent out to members either. They now apparently only available via the web portal message inbox.

Call it old fashioned, call it whatever but in this the twenty-first century, shouldn’t service providers such as Discovery Health rather be supporting more interactive mediums not less? After all, Discovery Health isn’t cheap! At the very least they should be providing quality, effective two-way communication platforms. By doing what they are doing, Discovery Health albeit willfully or otherwise, displays disdain towards it’s customers, the clear message being to negate one-on-one interaction as far as possible.