No jumpstart on vehicle after December holidays

I called Discovery Insure Call Centre to jump start my vehicle battery on Friday, 5th January 2018. And imagine my shock - Apparently, your roadside assistance does not cover coming to our residence anymore to help us recharge our batteries. They will help us on the roadside, (this is deemed as an emergency) but just not at our homes? Imagine the thousands of people coming back home after the holidays and coming back to this dreadful news? There was absolutely no correspondence that this service has been stopped.

Discovery Insure created a precedent and an expectation to the client that this service is being offered. And all of a sudden, in December, the month that most people are off on leave and have no access to their emails – they stop the service? Furthermore, the managers/supervisors at the call centre parrot the information off to the client and have no authority to do anything more. Also they don’t even provide email address or phone numbers of their managers.

Subsequently I found out that Outsurance provides this service to ANYONE. Even people who are not their clients.

Needless to say, they did not come to my aid, I had to go via other methods to get my car on the road again.

When I finally sent an email to the manager, Mr Johannes Nothnagel, he said "Discovery brought the towing services in-house on the 1st of December. Since then we have enforced the policy wording more strictly than our previous provider, Europ Assist. If you refer to section 15 of the plan guide it states that we will assist in case of a “roadside emergency”. We further state that when we do assist in the case of a roadside emergency that we would take the vehicle to the closest place of repair or safekeeping, whichever is closest. Thus if the vehicle is at home, it is already at the closest place of safekeeping. The precedent was unfortunately created by our previous service provider as they did not enforce the policy wording. This benefit was incorrectly granted in the past. We unfortunately did not know to what extent our previous SP allowed these services outside of policy guidelines and when we received feedback from clients and brokers alike as well as gathering valuable information from our staff, this information was consolidated and assessed with our clients best interest at heart and thus a decision was made that going forward Discovery would render this service as part of our value added service. "

The fact of the matter is that Discovery Insure did not inform their clients about this change No 2 - it is not the client's problem if they cannot manage their service providers properly. How is it possible that they did not know that Europ Assist helped clients with this services since inception? No 3 - the customer services at your call centre, is terrible. There is no empathy or anything - they parrot phrases out of a "set of rules", making them totally unsympathetic to our plight.