King Price delivers SA’s best customer experience, says new award

King price data analytics team

Insurer King Price has been named the brand that delivers the best customer experience in South Africa, thanks to its innovative use of technology to ensure a smoother claims process for loyal clients.

King Price was the big winner at Corinium’s inaugural Customer 360 Africa 2019 Awards in Sandton last week, beating some of the country’s best-known consumer brands to scoop the Best Customer Experience Award by an Organisation or Team in recognition of its ongoing innovations around enhancing the client journey.

The company entered the highly-competitive SA insurance market in June 2012 with a world-first customer-centric insurance model to automatically decrease comprehensive car premiums monthly in line with the cars’ depreciating values. But what clinched the award was the company’s use of technology to improve the customer experience, said King Price’s Dr Eugene Wessels (known to his colleagues as ‘Darth Vader of Data’).

“Since our launch, we’ve saved our clients R140 million in decreasing premiums, thereby placing them first. But being a customer-centric organisation is much more than giving premiums back. This Award recognises the journey that we’ve taken to position ourselves as the country’s leading customer-centric organisation, using a unique combination of higher purpose, culture and technology to enable compelling engagements with our clients,” said Dr Wessels.

The specific innovation that King Price entered for the award is a project to create a better client experience of high-value claims. The long processing time of high-value claims is a perennial bugbear for the industry, which makes for a frustrating customer experience and increased processing costs that are eventually passed on to the consumer.

“We asked ourselves: why can the insurance industry only process geyser and windscreen claims quickly? Historically, insurers interrogate high-value claims more closely because they have more to lose, even if their clients have been honest and loyal. We addressed this problem by only spending more time processing claims that have higher risk, as opposed to higher claim value,” said Dr Wessels.

To get to this point, King Price developed an industry-leading technology approach, that uses advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence to build rock-solid fraud detection algorithms. Today, an AI-powered robot – known internally as ‘Geriatrix’ – provides better fraud detection than can be achieved through manual intervention, delivering a faster claims process for clients and freeing up the company’s staff to deliver better customer service.

And the best is yet to come for King Price’s clients says Dr Wessels. “As consumers demand new ways of interacting and communicating with insurers, and their expectation of ‘instant gratification’ reaches into service fulfilment, so we’ll be able to anticipate their demands and pro-actively deliver more solutions that put our clients first at every step.”