Customer Experience: Supporting Our Agents & Brokers

Our partnerships with our agents and brokers are a key competitive advantage for us and an important driver of our long-term success. We aim to be their indispensable partner; together, we deliver on our promise to be there for our shared customers.

To best support our agents and brokers, we continually enhance and evolve our digital marketing and sales tools, which enable our partners to better identify and capture new business opportunities. We provide our agents and brokers with customizable social media, marketing and customer relationship resources, allowing them to engage more effectively with their target markets and local communities.

In addition, we support our agents and brokers as they face global challenges such as cybersecurity, inflation and marketplace conditions. For example, across all business lines, Travelers has implemented multifactor authentication with our agent and broker partners to help protect our customers, our company and each other from cybercrimes such as ransomware attacks, fraudulent sign-ins and other potential security breaches.

Some of the other ways we support our agent and broker partners are described below.

Personal Insurance

In 2023, Personal Insurance continued to provide agents with tools to help customers understand the factors driving premium increases across the industry. For example, we updated our Auto and Home Marketplace Guides and developed a new Home Replacement Cost Guide to help agents communicate with their customers confidently and effectively regarding the current marketplace. In addition, agents can use our Renewal Premium Compare Tool to address premium increase questions at renewal and find discounts that may help lower a customer’s premium.
To support agency development, we offer READY, SET, PIVOT^SM, a virtual program designed to prepare agents for the future of insurance. In 2023, we evolved the program to include sessions focused on navigating current marketplace conditions and consumer trends. We also held our annual in-person Travelers Agent Leadership Program, where agents engaged with their peers and Travelers leadership to discuss emerging sales opportunities within the current business environment. Both programs focus on helping agents learn new best practices and skills to increase sales, improve retention and enhance customer interaction by leveraging hundreds of digital marketing resources available through Travelers’ toolkitPlus.
In 2023, we continued to evolve our suite of agent self-service capabilities on the Travelers “For Agents” portal, to improve ease of use and the overall agent experience. Features added to the “For Agents” dashboard now provide more efficiency and transparency, enabling agency staff to be more proactive when servicing their customers. Quick links throughout the “For Agents” portal allow for seamless navigation to key information like quotes, billing, policy documents, commissions and access to a new claim app that offers more claim process details.

Business Insurance

In Business Insurance, we continue to digitize and streamline the transaction life cycle, so we can meet – and ultimately exceed – expectations and improve the overall experience for agents, brokers and customers.
We provide business insurance products to agents and brokers through our dedicated online portal “For Agents” and directly through multiple Agency Management Systems (AMS). We have also deployed an industry-leading collection of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that connect our platforms directly into virtually every major AMS and distribution platform in the marketplace.
In 2023, we introduced an online Workers Compensation Endorsement Request on our “For Agents” portal. This allows agents to submit common Workers Compensation policy change requests online. The result has been a much faster turnaround time for our agents. What once took between four and 10 days has been reduced to just four hours for 85% of these requests.
For larger brokers, we’re connecting directly to the desktops of their producers, allowing them to send us account data in real time. We also continue to invest in our risk information management services capabilities, such as e-CARMA^®, a key differentiator for our larger broker partners. For middle market customers who typically have more complex insurance requirements, we have updated our APIs so agents and brokers can digitally send multiline submissions via their own internal systems. And for smaller commercial customers, we have updated our APIs to return indications or fully bindable quotes for both Business Owner Package and Workers Compensation policies.
Additionally, we continue to roll out Travis^℠ – our new proprietary rate, quote and issue platform – to additional lines of business and states. With 60% fewer questions and 50% fewer screens, Travis significantly reduces the time and effort to compare rates, provide quotes and issue policies, thereby improving the experience for agents and customers alike.

Bond & Specialty Insurance

In Bond & Specialty Insurance, we continue to improve the agent experience by enhancing the convenience, connectivity and responsiveness of our digital solutions for Surety & Management Liability. We are leveraging our significant data advantage to improve time to market and deliver enhanced risk management content for our distribution partners and customers.

Educational programming for agents & brokers

Travelers Institute^® educational programming also offers unique value to our network of more than 15,000 agent and broker partners, providing a distinguished thought leadership platform. Over the past 15 years, the Travelers Institute has hosted more than 850 virtual and in-person events in collaboration with agents and brokers, enhancing these relationships while providing education and risk mitigation strategies to thousands of consumers.

The programming leverages our agents’ knowledge of how issues such as cybersecurity, distracted driving and natural disasters directly affect families, businesses and communities. Agencies and agent associations regularly co-host programs with the Travelers Institute, invite customers and provide expert speakers, showcasing their risk management expertise and reinforcing their value as trusted advisors for critical insurance decisions. In addition, the Travelers Institute offers presentations on the economic outlook and political landscape at agent conferences and events and provides educational content, including publications, social media campaigns and videos, for agents and brokers to share with clients.

The Travelers Institute also fosters these relationships and provides educational programming through its new Wednesdays with Woodward^® webinar series. The series launched in June 2020 to explore personal and professional issues impacting our agents, our brokers, our customers, our employees and the communities we serve. More than 100 programs have been held through the end of 2023, with topics including telematics-based insurance programs, cross-sector efforts to fight cybercrime and mental well-being in the workplace, among many others.

Notably, the Travelers Institute hosted the webinar Independent Agents: The Trusted Choice, offering an in-depth discussion on the importance and value of the independent agent distribution channel, the changing dynamics that agents are facing in the market today and how agents can thrive in the years ahead.

Additional programs explored distribution and agency trends for personal insurance and commercial insurance. These included the following webinars:

Travelers Institute programs are a great example of how our efforts to strengthen our communities also enhance our relationships with our agent and broker partners and drive our bottom line. In 2023, 91% of agents and brokers who responded to post-program surveys reported that the content was “very” or “extremely” valuable to them, while their comments often highlighted that these programs are shared with their teams.