To invite clients to post comments – positive or negative – on our website, took more than just a huge dose of courage. We were potentially opening ourselves up for massive reputational damage. If we delivered consistently poor service, and all the comments were negative, it could have done more harm than good. It could have exposed us as inept, hopeless, below par.

On the positive side, however, it would portray us as transparent and truly committed to customer satisfaction and awesome service levels. It would encourage clients to trust us, because we were not trying to sweep our blunders under the carpet. It would also improve channels of communication between us and our clients. Lastly, it would highlight problem areas such as bottlenecks, to which management could react swiftly. In short, it would portray us as honest and refreshing.

Above all else, it would make us the first company in SA (as far as we could establish) to do this.

Act of courage
We decided to take the plunge and do it. We were prepared to live with the risk of malicious people abusing the forum to harm us. We decided to place everything, no matter how scathingly negative it might have been. The only exceptions are blasphemy, hate speech, racism and banalities.

Great result
It turned out to be an absolute winner. We immediately became aware of problem areas. All new businesses have growing pains; the comments forum enabled us to effectively deal with our growing pains much quicker.

The split between compliments and complaints is roughly 50/50. This is encouraging, since people complain much easier than give compliments. I believe this initiative is the main reason why we have the highest compliment ratio in the industry on the independent website, hellopeter.com. It keeps us focused and on our toes. Our staff know they have no place to hide, they can’t sweep mistakes under the carpet. They also know if they delight clients, they might be honoured with a compliment that is visible to the whole world. In short, the comments forum has strengthened our service culture.

Challenge
It remains an open question why no-one else does this? Are service companies too scared to see what their clients think of them? Or don’t they really care? Just imagine what it will do to service levels in SA if all service related businesses had comments forums on their websites……

Our pledge
At MiWay, we remain committed to awesome service. We can’t guarantee that we will always get it right the first time, but we will certainly remain transparent and 100% committed to fixing our mistakes. Over time, I believe, our transparent approach will lead to our service levels reaching incomparable heights.

Kind regards,

When the founding members of MiWay sat down to plan and strategise, we realised the importance of offering clients something different. We also realised being different is not good enough; we needed to offer something that is different and better – better value, better service, or better price (lower premiums in insurance terms). A new company that simply offered the same as all the existing ones would have had a very small prospect of success, for the simple reason that it would not have offered consumers a compelling reason to move from their existing service providers.

The essence of business strategy, according to the gurus, is differentiation, as explained above.

The vision for MiWay is to establish a one-stop-shop financial services company, one that offers a wide range of financial services products under one brand. We decided to start with short-term insurance, but the medium to long term plan includes life insurance, investment products, loans, debit/credit cards, asset finance, etc. So, despite our current focus on car insurance, MiWay will eventually offer a lot more.

The challenge that faced us was to find meaningful differentiators in an already competitive short-term insurance industry. This was by no means an easy task. It is easier said than done. However, by listening to the typical gripes of consumers and finding solutions to it, we managed to bring a number of exciting differentiators to market. A number of these differentiators are also quite innovative in their own right. This provided the founding team with a great deal of satisfaction.

The list of differentiators includes the following:

1. A comments forum, where clients are invited to post compliments or complaints on our website.
2. A rewards programme (MiRewards) that is based on client loyalty and not on luck.
3. A portal (MiXpress) that enables online purchasing of products, as well as self service online administration of policies.
4. A motor insurance product (MiDriveStyle) that rates clients according to their own specific driver behaviour.
5. A values-based culture based on four unique core values.

In addition to the above, there are a number of differentiators planned for the future, when we roll out the rest of the financial services products. Differentiation and innovation have become part of the way we look at things, a way of life. In fact, our brand is being built around the concept of ‘coherent logic’, or ‘intelligent by design’. The customer must be able to say MiWay’s services are ‘designed for me’. This, of course, is a journey, not a destination. It implies a certain mindset towards everything we do. It also implies we will forever be in a state of continuous improvement. We will forever be asking ‘how can we do things smarter’?

I plan to place a series of discussions of these differentiators on my blog over the next number of weeks. I would appreciate feedback, comments, debate.

Kind regards,