As the industry continues its long journey to unifying customer experiences across traditional silos, Travelers used the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as a springboard for moving its needle significantly.
“We’re a high-tough, human-centric, highly-collaborative company whether we’re relating to customers, agents, brokers, partners or each other,” explains Claudiu Coltea, SVP and chief
During the two years leading up to the pandemic, Travelers developed and started executing a customer and agent journey transformation strategy. Significant initiatives included developing a digital customer onboarding process, improving agent online tools, rolling out an experience management platform, and increasing the adoption of digital collaboration solutions.
“When the pandemic hit we had pilots running in each of our large businesses, but only small pockets of individuals were involved,” Coltea says. “As the waves of shut-downs spread worldwide, we realized we needed to scale up all of the initiatives to become enterprise-wide deployments.”
Top 3 initiatives reveal additional needs
Using a multi-pronged, agile, human-centered approach, Travelers began with selecting
In tandem, Travelers worked with its IVR partner, Genesys, to embed AI into its platform for granular call routing. “During the first week of the U.S. national stay-at-home recommendation, our call volumes spiked by 30 percent for all Customer Advocacy call center teams,” says Coltea. “However, our teams actually fielded 10 percent fewer calls than average because so many of them were automatically routed to the appropriate area.”
A third critical initiative leveraged a combination of AI and hierarchical “SWAT” response teams for rapidly addressing issues surfacing in digital channels. This involved activating AI capabilities within Travelers’
“Previously, we used Qualtrics for experience analytics,” Coltea says. “Now it’s real-time detection and action tool. On average, the central SWAT team identifies an issue within 15 seconds. In less than five minutes they’ve analyzed and forwarded it to the appropriate secondary team. Then, the secondary SWAT team immediately reaches out to the individuals posting the issue and brings other resources to bear as needed.”
Travelers’ new data-driven abilities to rapidly identify and analyze pain points, whether via IVR or the experience management platform, subsequently led to scaling out other initiatives.
First, its existing customer journey team developed a completely digital quoting process for retail agents and brokers. “From the time we identified agent quoting challenges to designing the MVP [minimum viable product] for the all-digital solution was about four weeks,” says Coltea.
“This initiative reduced quote turnarounds from much as ten days to less than a day in many cases,” he continues. It also cued up the customer journey team to partner with the company’s digital and Salesforce teams to add further digital quoting enhancements.
Similarly, Travelers leveraged its existing DocuSign deployment to fully embrace e-signatures. “Prior to the pandemic, we used a hybrid wet and digital signature approach to meet our internal risk, legal and compliance requirements,” says Coltea. “Spurred by customer needs, we worked with those functional areas to develop an e-signature approach that satisfied various internal concerns and created a standardized process across all lines.”
Another notable project established an agent concierge service to streamline policyholder onboarding. “Agents wanted more help with answering consumer questions,” Coltea says. “We tested whether a giving each agent a single point of contact would be efficient and cost-effective. In fact, the concierge offering increased agent satisfaction by 22 percent and slashed onboarding time by eight days on average.”
Organizational epiphany leads to strategic internal partnerships
Enterprise-wide, the cumulative effects of Travelers’ CX efforts are palpable. “With customers, the emotional values on our Net Promoter Scores are all up 10 percent,” says Coltea. “In terms of product penetration and process efficiency, we’re seeing multi-million dollar benefits.”
Today, Travelers is working on multiple other significant projects identified by closely tracking pandemic experiences. One is consolidating written communications across all lines to ensure customers receive consistently branded messaging. Another is modernizing the Travelers agency data collection platform.
“In addition, we’re addressing other aspects of external and internal lifecycles, such as policy service, growth and renewal, and employee journeys,” Coltea says. “Each has received a substantial push from the pandemic.”
Moving forward, Coltea also expects considerable benefit from the pandemic-forged strategic partnership between his CX team and Travelers’ Technology & Operations unit. “For a long time, boosting customer experiences and achieving process improvements were considered incompatible,” he says. “It was an organizational ‘ah-ha moment’ to discover that we can strengthen our customer relationships and generate significant efficiency benefits – it’s not one or the other.”
Most importantly, Travelers has learned it can be high-touch and virtual simultaneously. “When we originally started our CX transformation journey, we were preparing for the future and not for a pandemic,” Coltea says. “It’s exciting to see that we’re developing nimble new ways to stay close to our customers, distributors and one another, no matter what the world looks like.”
