Insurance without phone calls — MiWay Blink vs Naked vs Pineapple

MiWay Blink, Naked Insurance, and Pineapple let you take up insurance on various items via a mobile app, but just one of the three won’t spam you with follow-up calls if you don’t take up their product.

South Africa has high road accident and car theft rates, making vehicle insurance an essential item in your monthly expenses.

Traditionally, getting quotes from different insurance providers was laborious, often requiring lengthy phone calls.

Call centre agents are required to bombard potential customers with a flurry of questions about their personal data and insurance history to produce an accurate quote.

Another long call might be required when you wish to cancel an insurance policy to switch to another provider, with retention departments dedicated to preventing you from leaving.

Naked, MiWay Blink, and Pineapple promise to make this much faster and simpler by doing everything in a mobile app.

MyBroadband tested these apps to see which offered the fastest and easiest way to get comprehensive car insurance without speaking to an agent.

Overall, we found that Naked and MiWay Blink had more streamlined interfaces, faster sign-up and quoting, and required less information than Pineapple.

With the two former apps, we got a quote for a Kia Sonet 1.5 LX CVT in less than two minutes, after about a minute setting up the personal profile of our prospective client.

The process involved answering a handful of basic questions with simple answers.

With the Pineapple quote, the process took about eight minutes despite using a Facebook account as a quick login method.

Among the additional hoops we needed to jump through was providing extra information about the car’s sleeping address and a long user history of vehicle accidents, incidents, or losses — going back five years.

This was much longer than Naked and MiWay Blink’s accident history periods of two and three years, respectively.

On top of wanting to know about claims stretching back further than these two providers, Pineapple requires additional details, such as the value of the loss and a short description of incidents.

Irritatingly, the latter required that we use at least ten characters, but we could not put any spaces in the input box.

Naked and MiWay Blink only wanted the year of the incident.

Both Pineapple and MiWay Blink had options to enter a number plate to automatically identify the car.

However, neither feature worked when entering a legitimate licence plate from a Gauteng car.

This meant the car’s details — including make and model — had to be entered manually. In the case of Pineapple, it also asked for the car’s colour.

Naked did not require that we provide a licence plate number during the quote — only the make and model of the user’s car.

Our test car was included in the list of models in its database.

The horror!

Frustratingly, both Pineapple and MiWay attempted to call us numerous times during or after generating the quotes.

Pineapple’s first call came within a minute of signing up and providing the user’s phone number, while we were at Step 1 of loading the vehicle details for the quote.

This was rather odd for a company that says it does not even have a call centre number and only allows customers to request callbacks.

It subsequently called three more times within an hour of generating the quote, which we had not yet accepted.

MiWay was an even bigger offender when it came to phone call spamming — attempting six times within 10 minutes of the quote being generated.

Over an hour later, the company tried to call at least three more times and sent an e-mail and SMS.

While the terms and conditions of using these apps give the companies permission to call you, it detracts significantly from their primary selling point — easy insurance sign-ups for people who don’t necessarily want to engage over the phone.

Naked did not not call once during or after generating our quote, despite the insurance product staying in our basket.

In fact, MyBroadband confirmed that none of the four employees in our office who use Naked have ever received a phone call from the company.

It has only occasionally followed up via e-mail when requiring additional information — like an additional photo showing an insured laptop could actually turn on, for example.

It seems to be the only provider of the three that truly handles all customer engagements through the app.

To MiWay’s credit, it offered the best premiums — with excesses ranging from R2,500 to R10,000.

It also provided discounts on premiums varying from 1% to 50% for monthly travel distances below 2,000km.

Naked had the next best premiums, with excesses ranging from R1,500 to R20,000.

Although it did not offer discounts based on monthly travel distances, it was the only insurer that offer the ability to pause accident cover to reduce your premium during prolonged periods where your vehicle is parked at home.

Pineapple’s premiums were the most expensive and had excesses ranging from R4,100 to R16,900.

Similar to MiWay, it offered a discount if the driver covered a limited distance each month.

However, it also specifically stated that the car we wanted to cover — which is not at high risk for theft — would require a tracker.

The table below summarises the differences between MyBroadband’s experiences with getting vehicle insurance quotes from Naked, MiWay Blink, and Pineapple.