Julia Herhammer, 5 May 2017

Discovery Insure – finally safe driving?

company-discovery-insure-wants-safe-driving

Discovery Insure acknowledges that roads are covered with speedster and slowcoaches everywhere. Everybody feels the desire to overtake or to brake those persons is dangerously high. The company shall provide a remedy.

Everybody knows the above mentioned struggles of driving on a daily base. Most of accidents happen due to those small issues and can be easily avoided if people would act appropriately. Unfortunately this is not the case but what if a single application can prevent that?

An innovative South African entrepreneur initiated the insurance company Discovery Insure to eliminate the risks of driving. They started their business in the insurance industry with Discovery Limited in 1992. After a couple of years the startup developed to a great and international successful enterprise and expanded internationally. They offer various long and short term insurances in sectors of:

health care
life insurance
savings and investment products
a wellness program

and in 2011 they introduced their innovative car insurance program. (Discovery Limited, 2017)

What makes Discovery Insure innovative?

The streets in South Africa count to the most dangerous ones in the world and despite all the already existing classic car insurances the rate of accidents does not decrease. They took that as inspiration to approach the system differently and reward the clients for good driving skills.

Discovery works with the latest telematics technology and digitalized their services to be attainable every time clients would require service. A sensor placed in the car and connected with an application tracks the client’s driving behavior for each trip they take like speeding, acceleration, harsh breaking, cornering and even the use of cellphones while driving. (Discovery Limited, 2017)

How to achieve rewards?

The given data can be seen in the application which scores you among all other customers of Discovery Insure by rating the style of driving, saves all trips and compares them. If you improve your driving skills you will be ranked higher step by step and for each improvement you will receive a reward. Those rewards can be 50% of fuel spent each month, a lower cost of policies, free parking, free car wash or even free drinks. (DiscoverySA, 2017) As you can see the reward system scores with its diversity.

But does it really make the streets safer? The goal of the rewards shall serve as a motivation for the customers to increase the awareness, improve their own driving skills and make the streets safer. In fact the rate of accidents in south Africa decreased by roughly 10 percent from 2014 to 2016. (Discovery Insure, 2016) The customers lower their costs of their insurance contract and the percentage of claims decrease therefore it is a win-win situation for both sides. (thedigitalinsurer, 2016)

Discovery Insure driving challenge

In 2014 the company challenged all the South African citizens to a driving competition in order to motivate them improving their skills. The first one has been established in 2014, with 60.000 participants where they collected more than 70 million km telematics data within 20 days. They can even win a prize: a share of R1 million in fuel vouchers. Participants have been extremely motivated that after only two days all participants improved their skills by 20% on average and moreover woman obtained even better results than men. A second one was carried out in 2015. People took that as a chance to improve their previous scores, and disprove the results of 2014. Men were encouraged to outperform women and vice versa they tried to outclass men. (Cover, 2015)

As you can see by that challenge people were motivated and spurred to improve their driving skills – in order to win the prize or not does not matter.

By giving the people a personal score, rating the style of driving, the user’s attention is called to oneself, realizing how well or bad his or her driving skills are, as many people overestimate their skills most of the time while driving. By setting incentives the clients stay engaged and actually really seek for improvement in order to receive a reward. As a result the application helps to increase the awareness of the own capabilities and weaknesses and furthermore helps to reveal exactly what needs to be improved. It really makes streets safer.

Julia Herhammer

Download a brochure & learn more about us

Would you like to learn more about our Bachelor's and Master's programmes at home in peace? Download the CBS brochure for an in-depth look at our business study programmes.

We hope that you enjoy getting to know more about our school, study programmes and what we stand for. Follow us on Instagram & Facebook, get to know us at one of our Information Events, or Contact our student advisors to get more info.