WENDY KNOWLER | Sales scriptwriters who lose the plot

I never cease to be amazed by what some companies and their third-party telesales agents deem to be ticking the “treating customers fairly” box when it comes to sales scripts.

It truly beggars belief. The scripts are highly prejudicial to the undereducated, those who have little financial or technological knowledge, the aged and the millions for whom English is a second or third language. They are often open to misinterpretation; the important bits glossed over with a few rushed, easy-to-miss words.

And seldom is there any attempt to check whether the person who has essentially been ambushed by the out-of-blue call has grasped what it is they are getting themselves into.

These days I push back hard when I hear a sales call recording that throws doubt on whether there was a “meeting of the minds” about the deal. I don’t just push for the consumer in question to be given the benefit of the doubt, but for the script to be changed. And gratifyingly, I often get that undertaking.

And I like to think — possibly naively — that the rewording actually does happen.

Remember Solomon Majaho of Midrand, whose R100,000 accident claim on his 2016 Opel Astra was initially rejected on the grounds that he had failed to reveal a one-year gap in his insurance cover?

Halfway through the 14-minute sales call a Budget Insurance rep made to him, he was quizzed about his insurance history.

“Over how many uninterrupted years have you been covered?”

His answer: “With this car and this insurance, it would be ... three months now.”

The agent responded: “With this question, it doesn’t matter which car or which insurance company. We are asking... How long have you been covered under comprehensive car insurance, continuously?

“Continuously?” he asked. “Four years.”

For the year before August 2022, Majaho did not have a car, so he had no need for motor insurance. But before that he was continuously insured for four years.

“You can clearly hear in the recording that the answers I provided were based on my understanding of the question and the salesperson never advised me properly as to exactly what they wanted.”

The script neglected to disclose that to actually watch any content on those platforms, Annenberg would have to pay extra subscription fees

To my mind, the agent didn’t do enough to ensure that there was no misunderstanding, especially given the potentially catastrophic consequences for someone who gets this answer wrong — and the fact that many people gave up their cars and their insurance policies during the Covid years.

Thankfully Budget Insurance — part of the Telesure group — agreed and paid the claim.

The company also undertook to introduce a follow-up question along the lines of: “And have you had no breaks after that?”

More recently, Dudley Annenberg of Cape Town got a call from MultiChoice’s third-party marketing company, offering him a second contract for just R240 a month which would give him the latest decoder and access to an array of entertainment platforms, including Netflix and Amazon.

The script neglected to disclose that to actually watch any content on those platforms, Annenberg would have to pay extra subscription fees.

MultiChoice agreed to cancel Annenberg’s contract, but it took me a couple of exchanges with the company’s spokesperson to get an acknowledgment that the wording would have to be tweaked to eliminate any misunderstanding.

The way Standard Bank Direct Life Insurance sold Rabea Mahommed a R200,000 Liberty life insurance policy four years ago is particularly shocking.

She died less than three years later, in late 2022, of natural causes and the claim was rejected because, her granddaughter Fatima Mahommed told me, it turned out she’d been paying premiums for an accidental death policy only.

(There was a second reason for the rejection — she had failed to pay the premiums for the two months before her death.)

The beneficiary of her life policy was Fatima’s now nine-year-old daughter.

The call recordings reveal that Mahommed, at the time 62 and working as a cleaner, was told in the initial call that her loved ones would be cared for by the policy payout “whether [you die] as a result of natural causes or even as a result of an accident”.

In subsequent calls, she was not explicitly told that there had been a mistake in the first call, and that the policy actually only covered accidental death.

The policy was just fleetingly referred to as “life, non-natural”.

The most easily understood word — “accidental” — was not uttered at all.

This after extensively questioning Mahommed about her health and how she was managing her diabetes. Of course, she was far more likely to die of natural causes than as a result of an accident, as are most elderly people.

Liberty insisted that they took “all efforts to ensure that Ms Mahommed had full understanding of the policy and cover she was taking with us”, but failed to elaborate.

There is certainly not a shred of evidence of that in the sales calls.

But in the end, despite those missed premiums, Liberty did see fit to pay Mahommed’s great-granddaughter an “ex gratia” amount of R100,000 “without prejudice and without admission of liability”.

If you believe that yours and your loved one’s life policy covers all forms of death, please check the wording.

CONTACT WENDY: E-mail: consumer@knowler.co.za X (Twitter): @wendyknowler Facebook: wendyknowlerconsumer