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 2024, Personal Insurance made significant investments to deliver industry-leading products, services and digital tools designed to help agents attract and retain customers and succeed in a dynamic market. Here are some key highlights:

Quantum Boat 2.0^SM. This enhanced boat product, available in 29 states as of December 2024, offers an improved quote and issue experience, making it easier for agents to deliver competitive options to their customers, faster.
IntelliDrive^®. We continue to enhance this innovative telematics offering, allowing agents to offer customers a program that rewards safe driving behaviors with savings, while riskier driving behaviors may result in higher premiums.
Support with customer conversations. To support agents in handling customer premium increase discussions, we updated our Auto and Home Marketplace Guides and continued to offer the Renewal Premium Compare Tool. The Renewal Premium Compare Tool outlines the factors driving individual customer premium increases, helping agents provide clear and detailed explanations.
Educational resources. In 2024, we continued to develop new educational resources to assist agents in offering coverage options that best fit individual customer needs, including our Roof and Policy Deductible Guides. We also offer READY, SET, PIVOT^SM, a virtual program designed to prepare agents for the future of insurance. In 2024, we evolved the program to include sessions focused on advancing digital capabilities, navigating marketplace conditions and capitalizing on 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.

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 (AMSs). 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.

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 through their own internal systems. 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.

Finally, Travis^®, our proprietary quoting platform, continues to roll out and significantly reduce the time for agents to quote and issue policies.

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 12,700 agent and broker partners, providing a distinguished thought leadership platform. Spanning 15 years and nearly 1,200 events and speaking engagements, the Travelers Institute has collaborated with agents and brokers, enhancing these relationships while providing education and risk mitigation strategies to thousands of consumers. As an example, the Travelers Institute offers presentations on the economic outlook and political landscape at agent conferences and events and provides educational content for agents and brokers to share with clients.

Other Travelers Institute 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. Throughout 2024, the Travelers Institute offered continuing education (CE) credits to agents and brokers who attended cybersecurity education symposia. In total, 166 agents and brokers across eight states and the District of Columbia received CE credit, a valuable step in renewing their insurance license.

The Travelers Institute also fosters relationships with the company’s agent and broker partners and provides educational programming through its Wednesdays with Woodward^® webinar series. The series explores personal and professional issues impacting our agents, our brokers, our customers, our employees and the communities we serve. Through the end of 2024, 136 programs have been held, with topics including telematics-based insurance programs, cross-sector efforts to fight cybercrime and mental well-being in the workplace, among many others.

Notably, in 2024, the Travelers Institute hosted the webinar Mastering Market Shifts: What Independent Insurance Professionals Need to Know, which featured a discussion with Charles Symington, President and CEO of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America (The Big “I”), who discussed new findings from the Agency Universe Study, a comprehensive look at the independent agency system.

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 2024, 94% 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.