Jeff Bezos (or should it be Jeff Bezillionaire) started selling books online in 1994, and in less than three decades, he now tops the charts as the wealthiest dude on the planet. Sure, Amazon has morphed into an online behemoth, that is slowly and surely building a global logistics business aimed at delivering just about anything you want to your front door via drones, but Jeff started off running a book shop.
The secret to Amazon’s success lies in the fact that Mr Bezos saw the potential of the internet early on, and figured the world needed an online book shop. Turns out he was right and the rest, as they say, is history 🙂
Amazon and all the other online upstarts, of that era, paved the way for the world we live in today. Dial-up modems have been replaced with super-fast fibre lines and 5G is starting to spring up around the world quicker than you can say “Zoom drinks at 5 this afternoon”.
Now that we can scoot around the web at breakneck speed, we are also feeling much better about the fact that we can purchase things online, right?
Online retail in South Africa has come on in leaps and bounds since the guys at Kalahari.com kicked things off 4 years after our democracy (yip way back in 1998) and their legacy lives on through Takealot.com.
It’s estimated that online retail in South Africa will be worth 20 billion Rand in 2020.
At Stangen we don’t sell books, clothes or sneakers online?
We match South Africans with insurance cover that we would offer our very own family members.
Come to think of it, we kinda think of ourselves as the Takealot of the South African insurance industry, and if we could ask Jeff Bezos to score us, we wonder what he might give us out of 10?
Ok, we don’t have drones flying around, delivering policy documents just yet, but consider these four points for a second:
1. You can take out a life insurance policy with us online (no need to speak to a call centre agent)
2. You can service your policy online via our My Policy Dashboard portal
3. We’ve just launched our Express Life cover offering that requires no medicals and for you to only answer a handful of quick questions.
4. The ink on our new King Price partnership deal has only just dried.
Buy a policy online
You’ve always been able to buy a policy online through our website but we want people to make the right decision about their purchases so we’ve built you a nifty calculator. It’s the most logical way to approach any life insurance decision.
Our online cover calculator allows you to:
· Work out how much money your family will need to settle your outstanding debts
· How much income you’ll need to provide for your surviving spouse
· Work out the cost of future education expenses
Manage your policy online
Owning life insurance is a bit like owning a car.
Once the initial purchase step is out of the way, your car requires an ongoing maintenance plan. Never in the 130-year history of the automobile has anyone, who owns a car, managed to keep it running without servicing it regularly.
Your life insurance policy doesn’t require an oil change or new champion spark plugs, but at some stage down the line you might:
· Need to update your bank account details
· Update your nominated beneficiary’s details
· Increase your existing cover
· Add additional benefits like disability, critical illness and salary protection cover
Administering any insurance policy can be tedious and time-consuming. It’s a hack!
Take a simple life insurance beneficiary nomination change.
You either need to call through to a call centre, stay on hold listening to elevator music for 5-minutes, before fighting your way through a couple of internal reroutes until you eventually land up in the client services department.
Or
You need to contact your broker and ask them to email you a beneficiary nomination form, which you need to print, sign, scan and return before setting a reminder on your phone to make sure you get a copy of the policy document back, confirming your instructions have been actioned.
None of the above are the best use of your time, are they?
Surely an insurer could find a solution to these insurance admin hacks?
While we can’t help you with a car service, we can help you service your policy online.
Introducing the “My Policy Dashboard”
Once you become a Stangen policyholder, you have access to the “My Policy Dashboard” portal which is positioned on the top right-hand side of our website.
Think of it as your online policy servicing centre.
Once you’ve registered and logged in, you’ll have a dashboard view of your policy, including a full-service history of your policy changes and you can:
· Update your bank details
· Update your beneficiary’s details
· Increase your existing cover
· Decrease your cover
· Remove benefits
· Request additional benefit add-ons
· Get in touch with us
· Use the LiveChat functionality
Our new Express Life Cover Offering
What if we asked you 5 simple medical questions and, on the back of that, we offered you life cover without you needing to have any medicals done? We are literally talking about taking out insurance online within a couple of minutes.
Our new Express Cover offering aims to do just that. We know thousands of South Africans don’t want to spend a huge amount of time answering all types of personal questions just so they can get some life cover in place.
With that in mind, we’ve streamlined the underwriting process and given you the option to:
· Answer a couple of quick medical questions and get a limited cover amount
· Answer a few more questions and be able to get cover up to R1 500 000
· Take a few more minutes and be able to get up to R10 0000 cover
Our new King Price Partnership
We’ve also recently partnered up with the guys and gals at King Price, who’ve been pioneers in the car and home insurance industry for the past eight years. Our thoughts and goals are aligned and while we aren’t sending anyone off to Mars with our current product and online innovations, what is important is that we are always looking to provide our customers with a better online offering and products that are affordable and comprehensive.
We are going to try and reach out to Jeff and get his scorecard on our progress, but if you are a policyholder we would love to hear your thoughts.
Are we innovating enough?
Until next time
The Wise About Life Team.
