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Life is Difficult: How Can Business Do More to Help?

Retrenchments, losing benefits and greed. Life is hard for the majority of South Africans. So shouldn’t business do more to help people?

It’s a fact. Life is very hard for the majority of South Africans. Our economy wasn’t doing well even before Covid-19. We have a very high unemployment rate, many people suffer from poverty and crime is on the increase. Ask yourself, shouldn’t businesses do more to help people? We say yes! We believe that businesses should be doing more and doing things better to help improve and ease the lives of their customers.

If you look at the Covid-19 pandemic, there are examples of how businesses could have done things a little differently and a lot better.

Retrenchment and pay cuts

When the national Covid-19 lockdown was announced, many businesses had a knee-jerk reaction. They quickly retrenched employees or cut their working hours and salaries. Some forced employees to stay home, and then deducted the time from their annual leave.

This is not fair. This is not kind. This only puts more pressure on people.

Insurers withdraw their benefits

But there’s something worse than that. When people got retrenched during the pandemic, some insurance companies withdrew their income protection benefits. Income protection is a policy that pays if you get retrenched or lose your job, which is exactly what happened to so many South Africans. But the companies involved said that they won’t pay because the pandemic was an unforeseen event. So they just cancelled all the benefits on the policies if it was related to Covid-19.

Just imagine – you’ve been paying your premiums all this time, and suddenly, WHAM, just when you need it most, they refuse to pay you. Now, how is that fair? How is that good business? How is that kind to people?

Shouldn’t business do more to help instead?

Now, maybe those companies saved money – of course they did, they didn’t pay out. But what have they lost in the process? Trust. Integrity. Would you trust that company if it let you down just when you needed it?

And, on the other side, how can companies like that ever expect to see the country grow if they keep harming the people? At The Unlimited, we believe that business and government can and should do more to help the people of our country. That’s why, during the same Covid-19 crisis, we did things very differently:

How did The Unlimited do more to make things better?

We gave people payment holidays
Many of our Unlimited Family customers were unable to work during the lockdown. So they couldn’t afford their monthly payments for a month or two. But we didn’t chase them away. We gave them a payment holiday – we said they didn’t have to pay until they went back to work. That way, our Family could keep their benefits, even if they couldn’t pay.

That’s making our customers’ lives easier.
We restructured policy agreements
If someone lost income and they knew they couldn’t pay for a long time – a few months or longer, we also helped them. We called them and spent time with them to restructure their policy, to make the monthly payment less, to suit what they could afford. We made a plan so they don’t have to lose their cover. Whatever the situation, if a customer phoned us and said they needed help, we found a way to help. Because that’s what Family does.

That’s making our customers’ lives better.
We even invested in new tech so people could work from home
We didn’t want our own employees or those at the businesses that support us to lose income either. That’s why we bought new technologies and set everyone up to work from home. Even some of our suppliers – separate companies that work with us – got new tech so their people could work from home and keep earning money, even during the lockdown.

That’s shifting people’s lives.

Now, ask yourself: Isn’t that a better way to do business? Isn’t that doing more? Do you trust a company that helps people more? Wouldn’t you rather deal with a company that takes care of you and your family?

So, join The Unlimited where we do more and we do it better. Take out one of our products now and become a valued member of our Family.

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