I know that most of you believe that a tragic event will never occur to you. But, no one is free from an unexpected accident. No matter how careful you are, an accident can happen due to the fault of others. If you largely contribute to family finance, you will want to prevent your family from having a financially difficult time due to an accident. That’s when we need income protection here in Australia. This article will explain how to use HESTA income protection and also share my customer review analysis.
About HESTA
HESTA is an industry superannuation fund for employees in the health and community service sectors in Australia. The firm was founded in 1987, and it serves more than 70,000 employers and has over 850,000 members managing $46 billion funds. Of the total members, 80 percent are women. (Wikipedia)
Who Can Use HESTA Income Protection
To use HESTA Income Protection, you should join HESTA Superannuation as a member. Although HESTA is originally an industry super fund for those working in the health and community service industry, it is open for anyone to join. The MoneySmart website explains that large industry super funds let anyone join while some other funds only allow employees in a specific industry.
To join HESTA super fund, simply visit this web page and start the process. It seemed to be easy and straightforward to create a super account. Once you start joining the membership, you will see that step 4 is an insurance section. There, you can choose your HESTA income protection.
About HESTA Income Protection
I believe that you were able to join their super fund and set up income protection. Let me share some details about HESTA Income Protection. The Income Protection provides some part of your full income for the first two years if you are temporarily unable to work because of illness or injury. After two years, if you are deemed to be disabled permanently for your job, you will continue to receive a benefit.
HESTA Income Protection cover can start from the age of 15, and it ends at 67. Although you have pre-existing medical conditions, you can still be covered. Plus, your cover is not limited even if your employer contributions are not received. Also, if a claim has previously been paid under the same type of cover, you can still be provided with the cover. However, note that if you have been paid a Total and Permanent Disability or Terminal Illness benefit from any insurance policy or superannuation fund, you will not be eligible for any cover.
Once you apply for a claim, you will have to wait 90 days before the claim is made. The insurance cost varies depending on your cover level and your age. Please find more price details on this web page.
Other Eligibility Checks
In addition to the basic conditions, there are several more you should consider. For these additional eligibility requirements, I referred to the Insurance in Super Fact Sheet.
- HESTA Personal Super member must be At Work (explained the section below) when provided with cover.
- Cover is restricted to New Events Cover (explained the section below). The income protection cover is for the following persons:
- HESTA Personal Super members on the cover commencement.
- HESTA super members:
- That are not in Active Employment (explained the section below) when the person is provided with cover.
- If the person joins HESTA more than six months after beginning with an employer and the person is under 55 years old, cover is restricted to New Events Cover (explained the section below) for two years. This restriction gets removed if you are in Active Employment on your second year as a member. If that is not the case, the restriction is removed once you are in Active Employment for two consecutive months thereafter.
- If the person is aged at 55 or over when cover begins.
Terms
Active Employment means an ability to conduct or be able to perform all the duties of the person’s normal job full-time on the date that cover commences. HESTA members get standard cover upon joining. That, however, is except a circumstance where the person may have previously canceled or opted out of cover. In this case, the person will receive New Events Cover only. To remove New Events Cover, you will need to finish a full insurance cover application form.
New Events Cover means the cover is only for claims made from an illness which first becomes apparent or an injury which first occurs on or after the cover date started.
At Work means an ability to perform or be capable of performing all the duties and hours of the occupation from which the member earns his or her regular income.
We have discovered how Hesta Income Protection works. Next, let’s find out how good their service is. Since HESTA Income Protection is part of HESTA Superannuation fund, I researched about how people think about HESTA Super Fund.
Photo by Ulises Baga on Unsplash
How Customers Think About HESTA Super Fund
When you see product introduction from a company, you will always hear great things about it. No company will reveal any weaknesses or defects of the product, obviously. So, as a consumer, it is wiser to doubt what they say and do your own research before making a final purchase decision. In this section, we will learn how actual users think about HESTA Super Fund. How can we measure these? We can do this by using data analysis techniques called sentiment analysis.
You don’t have to be scared by the technical term. I did the technical part and you can just look at pretty graphs. In this section, I will show you two types of graphs – word cloud and customer sentiment chart. For the analysis, I’ve compiled about 400 customer reviews from ProductReview and conducted analysis to summarize them. I will show you the result in a word cloud and a customer sentiments chart. And, lastly, I will share a HESTA Google trend result that shows the level of interest from people.
Word Cloud
Word cloud is one of the great and fun ways to understand customer sentiments toward a product or a service. In a word cloud, you can see specific words in different sizes. The larger it is, the more people used that word to describe the product. For this word cloud, I used the titles of the reviews, since people put the essence of their opinions in the title. The 400 reviews allowed me to generate an interesting word cloud that let me reach a positive conclusion. Let’s have a look!
Understanding the word cloud is easy. Just follow your eyes and see what you see. You will see that most of the big words are all positive. This means that users have had a positive experience with the Super fund. People used words like “great”, “excellent”, “happy”, “helpful”, “fantastic”, “helpful”, and more positive terms to describe the product.
Customer Sentiments
In the word cloud, we were able to observe what descriptive words people used to talk about HESTA Super Fund. As mentioned, the word cloud is based on the titles of customer reviews, but the sentiment analysis graph was generated by the contents of the reviews. In the sentiment analysis, we will see more specific types of feeling that people showed in their review. In the analysis, you can see 10 different sentiments such as positive, negative, trust, anticipation, joy, fear, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust.
The technology behind the chart is straightforward. The analysis algorithm holds 10 different lists – each list containing words that are mapped to one of the 10 sentiments. When this algorithm runs, it checks and matches with one of the sentiments. When matched, it is counted as one and is categorized in one of the 10 sentiments. My analysis on the positive reviews appears as below.
The chart is also not difficult to understand. You can see that the positive sentiment is ranked number one. The first rank is followed by “negative”, “trust”, “sadness”, “anticipation” and “joy”. It does have some negative opinions, but overall, people shared more positive sentiments than negative ones. So my customer review analysis told me that the majority of the people have a positive experience with HESTA Super Fund.
Google Trend
As the final segment of analysis, let me share the trend of HESTA. I used Google Trend to check how frequently “HESTA” is searched on Google over five years. Google Trend is a useful tool to measure the interest of people. The more frequently people search on Google, the more popular or trendy it is. The Google Trend result below (not visible on mobile phones) below shows that people have shown a slightly increased and continuous interest in the super fund.
Please note that this trend is only from Australia. If we break down the trend by state, it looks as below. The biggest interest came from Tasmania, followed by Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, Nothern Territory, and South Australia.
Conclusion
We have learned about HESTA Income Protection and how people think about HESTA Super Fund. As we have found out, most of the people have had a positive experience with their service. If you are looking for a super fund or income protection insurance, HESTA can be a good choice.
