If you value peace of mind, find a different service provider.

I want you for a moment to imagine;

It’s a dark night and you are making your way home; when the unfortunate reality of driving happens upon you, and you are involved in a minor fender bender. The accident leaves your car undriveable. You find yourself in a dark area, surrounded by angry people who want to escalate the situation into dangerous territory.

You feign calmness. The worst thing to do in such situations is to panic. You then reach out for your cellphone and attempt to reach out to your insurer, who you’ve been faithfully paying your premiums to. During their sales pitch, they told you about all these amazing benefits that convinced you to join them, and being owned by a large institution also played to your logic. They are too big to flake.

However, there seems to be a slight problem. The only way to reach out to your insurer is by calling into their contact centre. They were untouched by the everyone-needs-an-app frenzy that washed over the world not so long ago. So, you call in. Not only are you in a dark place, you live in a hybrid country that struggles to keep its lights on, and so your cellphone reception is flakey at best.

You faithfully call into the contact centre and are ping-ponged around various departments. Unfortunately for you, this process is repeated a few times because your call drops every once in a while due to the terrible reception. But you trudge along. It’s not like you have another choice.

While navigating this quicksand, there’s a menacing growing mob. You feel unsafe. You are far from home or anyone you know. It dawns on you, you are on your own!

After finally being routed around departments, switch-board style, you are told that the department you are trying to reach is closed for the day. It took a 30 minute call for you to learn that.

——— Although this may sound a slice of fiction; it is not. This is the customer experience that Nedbank Insurance provides its clients. The same clients who faithfully keep up with the whirlwind of its premiums. It boggles the mind.

The not-so-fiction does not stop there, nope! When you call during working hours, you get to relive the ping-pong experience, but wait, there’s more! The claims department hangs the call this time around. So you are left wondering if all those premiums you paid amount to this treatment. A mind-festering, emotion-toiling experience.

My fender bender is a relatively small problem to fix on my own. But I definitely won’t be staying around to find out what happens when the problems scale up.

—— It wasn’t all doom and gloom in this experience. My shining stars were Audi SA, for having such a stellar contact centre experience coupled with its highly responsive roadside assist network. ( Maybe you guys need to get into the insurance game, Eh? I would pay pretty penny for that peace of mind). And not forgetting McCathy Bidvest Club, for providing a roadside guardian, as promised. This is what turns a client into a loyal brand advocate. It took exactly one call to each of these brands, spoke for less than 10 minutes, and help was teleported there in what seemed to be an instant. Keep up the good work guys.

——

Nedbank Insurance, Do better.

MFC: ***, *** - Complaint number: 792 780 60

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Moreover, it has been about 90 days since the incident. I am still being given the runaround. I have now finally taken the matter legal. All of this is to get a simple fender bender fixed. Imagine if it was a much more expensive problem.