Discovery – Insure

Head of Customer Experience and Insights Enablement | Divisional Manager - Short Term Insurance

About Discovery

Discovery’s core purpose is to make people healthier and to enhance and protect their lives. We seek out and invest in exceptional individuals who understand and support our core purpose, and whose own values align with those of Discovery. Our fast-paced and dynamic environment enables smart, self-driven people to be their best. As global thought leaders, Discovery is passionate about innovating in order to not only achieve financial success, but to ignite positive and meaningful change within our society.

About Discovery Insure

Discovery Insure is committed to creating a nation of great drivers and building better businesses through our innovative Shared-value Insurance model. Discovery Insure is South Africa’s fastest growing short-term insurance company with comprehensive products that provide protection against current and emerging risks facing clients in the motor and home. Vitality Drive, an internationally recognised and award-winning programme, is a key differentiator in the market that incentivises and rewards clients for driving well. The Vitality Drive programme has been scaled to local and international markets which now include Europe and the Middle East. The company is committed to putting our customers and financial advisers first by providing unique and innovative solutions and cover.  

Key Purpose

The Head of Customer Insights and Experience Enablement is responsible for transforming customer insight into measurable business impact. This role leads the design, integration, and enablement of customer insight, journey excellence, communication standards, and CX (customer experience) culture.

The role ensures a single, integrated view of customer truth across complaints, QA, research, sentiment, and operational performance, enabling root cause resolution, journey optimisation, and accountability.

Areas of responsibility may include but not limited to

Customer Insight Leadership

• Establish and lead a single, integrated customer insight ecosystem that consolidates complaints, quality assurance, surveys, social sentiment, and research into a unified source of customer truth.
• Define and govern Discovery Insure Voice of the Customer (VoC) measurement frameworks, experience standards, and associated KPIs to ensure consistency and comparability across the business.
• Translate customer insights into clearly prioritised, outcome-driven action plans with defined ownership, tracking mechanisms, and executive visibility.
• Provide proactive and early visibility of emerging risks, systemic issues, and trust-impacting themes to enable timely intervention and preventative action.

Customer Journey and Research 

• Provide direction to the business and leaders regarding strategic customer intelligence, promoting sound understanding of customer segments, trends, needs and expectations.
• Lead the design and evolution of future-state customer journeys, ensuring journey mapping is insight-led, outcome-focused, and aligned to strategic business priorities.
• Institutionalise clear journey governance, standards, and ownership across the organisation to ensure consistency, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Embed real-time customer journey measurement and performance tracking to proactively identify friction, monitor impact, and inform prioritised action.

Customer Communication Strategy

• Lead the development and ongoing refinement of customer communication principles and standards to ensure consistency and excellence across all business communication.
• Ensure all customer messaging is compliant, clear, customer-centric and value-adding, while consistently reflecting the Discovery Insure mindset and brand promise.
• Identify and eliminate communication friction across key customer touchpoints to improve clarity, reduce effort, and enhance the overall customer experience.
• Design and implement a journey-linked communication strategy that strengthens customer understanding, builds loyalty, and supports long-term customer value.
• Enable and embed a seamless omnichannel communication capability, ensuring aligned messaging and a consistent experience across digital, voice, and operational channels.

Culture and CX Capability Enablement

• Lead the embedding of the Make it Worth It (MIWI) behaviours and the Discovery Insure Transactional Analysis training programme across operations, formalising clear standards aligned to an integrated training and culture framework.
• Build and strengthen Customer Experience capability within operational leadership, equipping leaders with the tools, language, and frameworks to drive consistent customer outcomes.
• Enable frontline teams to clearly understand their role in shaping customer trust, experience quality, and business performance.
• Drive the adoption and consistent application of customer-centric decision-making frameworks across operational teams to ensure insight translates into improved customer outcomes.

Insights and Reporting

• Lead the collection, analysis, and interpretation of customer, employee, and competitor data to generate clear, actionable insights that inform decision-making, enhance the customer journey, and support acquisition, retention, and profitability.

Governance and Accountability

• Define and implement a structured prioritisation framework that aligns customer experience initiatives to business risk, customer impact, and strategic outcomes.
• Embed robust root cause identification and prevention mechanisms to address systemic issues and prevent recurrence, rather than treating symptoms.
• Establish and maintain clear executive reporting dashboards that link customer experience metrics to retention, complaint trends, operational performance, and value creation.
• Drive measurable and sustained reductions in repeat, preventable, and systemic complaints through insight-led action and cross-functional accountability.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Identify and manage internal stakeholders, to align on customer priorities—translating insights into clear CX enablement plans, driving accountability, and embedding customer-led decision-making across the business.

Leadership and Team Development

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of functional heads and specialists, creating clarity of mandate, strong accountability, and aligned performance standards.
• Build and sustain high-performance, insight-driven teams that translate customer intelligence into measurable business impact.
• Attract, develop, and retain top talent across Customer Experience, analytics, research, and communication disciplines to ensure depth of capability and succession strength.
• Foster strong cross-functional collaboration across operations, product, digital, data, marketing, and risk to ensure customer insight drives enterprise-wide action.

Education

• Matric – Essential
• Bachelor’s degree (Business, Commerce, Behavioural Science, Marketing, Data, or related) – Essential
• Postgraduate qualification - Advantageous
• Data analytics qualification - Advantageous
• CXPA (Customer Experience Professionals Association) – Advantageous

Certification/s 

• CCXP / ACXP certification - Advantageous
• Change management certification - Advantageous

Experience

•  Minimum 5+ years’ experience in leading Customer Experience management, change initiatives in financial services, Customer Insights, or Customer Transformation - Essential
• Proven leadership of multi-disciplinary teams (research, analytics, CX design, communications) - Essential
• Demonstrated success embedding enterprise-wide VoC or Customer Success models -Essential
• Experience in Insurance or Financial services - Essential
• Management consulting experience - Essential
• Experience implementing journey orchestration or CX technology platforms - Essential
• Experience linking CX strategy to measurable outcomes (retention, LTV (Lifetime Value), cost-to-serve) - Essential

Skills

•  VoC Strategy and Measurement - Expert
• Customer Journey Design and Governance - Expert
• Experience Analytics and Insight Translation - Expert
• Root Cause and Systems Thinking - Expert
• Customer Communication Strategy - Expert
• Executive Stakeholder Management - Expert
• Change and Culture Enablement - Advanced
• Technology enablement – Advanced

Work model

•  Expected to be in the office 4 days a week per month

EMPLOYMENT EQUITY   
                             
The Company’s approved Employment Equity Plan and Targets will be considered as part of the recruitment process. As an Equal Opportunities employer, we actively encourage and welcome people with various disabilities to apply.