MARKETING

MORE THAN LIP SERVICE

Travelers Personal Lines demonstrates its commitment to agents
with its innovative products and services

By Phil Zinkewicz

Joseph P. Lacher, Jr., CEO of Travelers Personal Lines, discusses the new ‘Helping Agents Grow’ campaign, which includes template ads for print, radio and television that agencies can personalize to use for marketing.

Well, the holidays are over. The caroling has ceased. We’ve put the Christmas lists behind us. There will be no more Hollywood miracles on 34th Street for at least another 10 months. George Bailey has seen the light and is back at his wonderful life at the old building and loan. Reality is back with us.

This time around, for those in the insurance industry, reality means once more dealing with a changing insurance cycle—a softer cycle than the hard one that has dominated the industry for the past five years. Insurance companies will be looking more kindly on exposures than they have in the recent past, and independent insurance agents will be able to offer their clients more “choices” than have heretofore been available—that is, until the next hard cycle starts to rear its ugly head. How long will that take—two years, three years, five years?

For independent agents, especially for those who have been around for a few industry cycles, this “danse macabre” must be as tiring as it is frustrating. The challenges in running an agency, growing it, making a profit and satisfying customers while insurers are alternately aggressively writing new business and then shunning it must be daunting, to say the least. The question is, in attempting to meet these challenges, how much assistance do agents really receive from the insurance companies they represent?

“What agents need most from companies is consistency,” says Charles Laskey of the Ron Black Agency in Royersford, Pennsylvania. “We need companies that strive for consistency in underwriting and in claims handling. We need companies that make it easier for us to do business. We look for companies that are creative in their product lines. We benefit from companies that truly want to ‘partner’ with their agents and not just give that word lip service.”

Roger Smith of the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based Huffaker & Trimble, couldn’t agree more. “Consistency is of the utmost importance in the agency-company relationship,” he says. “We count on companies that do what they say they are going to do, and do it over a period of time, not just when markets are soft. To truly ‘partner’ with independent agents, companies must be consistent in their pricing, innovative in their product lines and ready to make investments in their technology to make the agent’s job easier.”

Both Laskey and Smith say, without a doubt, that Travelers Personal Lines, a division of St. Paul Travelers, represents the kind of company commitment that agents want and need. Laskey is chairman of the Travelers Producers’ Council and Smith is a member. They both say that the two-day, twice-a-year meetings between the Council and Travelers executives are invaluable. “At these meetings, we all sit in a room and reason together,” says Laskey. “The Travelers people really listen and give valuable feedback. When I go to a meeting, I always bring a list of things we all decided upon at the previous meeting, things that needed to be implemented. If there are ten items on that list, I find that seven or eight of them have already been taken care of.

“Travelers’ technology makes it easy for us to do business,” he continues. “In fact, we quote Travelers to customers just because it is easier doing business with Travelers than with other companies. In addition, Travelers offers promotional mailings for its agents, customized with the agency’s logo, to help them increase retention, round accounts and increase profitability. The client thinks these mailings come from the agency and we pick up new business because of it. Travelers’ product line is broader than other companies. With Travelers, I can write all the coverages my clients want, whereas with other companies there is almost always an E&O situation because of gaps in coverage.”

As far as claims handling is concerned, Laskey says, “when one of my customers has a claim and I find out that customer is with Travelers, I always breathe a sigh of relief. There are people at Travelers I can talk to in order to assist the insured. That helps me retain customers.”

In addition to all those things, Smith talks about Travelers’ workshops for agencies. “At these workshops, agents are trained not just on how to do business with Travelers but how to better run their agencies. To increase customer satisfaction, Travelers is embarking on a new program whereby adjusters in the field will go to homes to investigate claims or to the scene of a traffic accident. In this way, they will be able to meet the public and do a better job in the claims process.”

Joseph P. Lacher, Jr., CEO of Travelers Personal Lines, has been at the helm of the company’s personal lines operations since January 2002. Prior to that, he was senior vice president of pricing, product and underwriting for personal lines. “We have an overall philosophy that it is our mission to help agencies grow,” says Lacher. “We don’t spend money unless it results in the cash register ringing for our agencies. We have a wide variety of key programs and initiatives in place to support our network of independent agents. We invest significant dollars in sales and marketing tools, service and technology to help support our agents’ efforts to grow their businesses, with the overall goal of being the carrier of choice for our agents and their customers.”

Lacher says that in the first quarter of 2005, “Travelers will debut our new ‘Helping Agents Grow’ campaign, which includes template ads for print, radio and TV that agents can personalize with their logo and contact information and place in their local media. The ads demonstrate the benefits of working with an independent agent through the key message for consumers that independent agents are looking out for their interests.

“In terms of technology,” Lacher continues, “Travelers offers a wide range of electronic services, including real-time policy quoting and issuing, download capabilities, and electronic policy view. Our agent Web site, Agent HQ, provides easy access through the Internet to the many systems, forms and applications that independent agencies use on a daily basis. The site also provides convenient access to detailed information for agents about personal and commercial lines products. Our consumer Web site provides helpful features such as an Agent Locator for customers who wish to find a Travelers agent in their vicinity.”

As far as service is concerned, Lacher says that Travelers is heavily committed to further strengthening its relationship with its agents. “One key to this commitment is the development of relationship managers—liaisons who span business lines to represent all of Travelers’ business lines to an agency and its customers, helping to broaden and deepen agency relations and increase sales and ease of doing business with Travelers,” Lacher explains. “Travelers’ Customer Care Center offers a variety of customer services designed to help agents boost sales, revenue and customer satisfaction. The center is staffed by licensed, experienced insurance professionals who cost-effectively manage service functions for agencies, such as providing policy information and processing policy changes.”

Sample ad from Travelers Personal Lines ‘Helping Agents Grow’ campaign.

Travelers also offers independent agents its One-to-One program, a direct marketing program with proven results that increases customer retention by five to six percentage points on average, according to Lacher. “One-to-One was developed to provide agents with a systematic process for improving customer retention, generating new business and account rounding. When an agency enrolls, strategically scheduled mailings—customized with the agency logo—are sent to its customers to facilitate renewal. Supplemental mailings are available to help agents round out accounts with home, auto, boat, flood and identity fraud expense coverage. Travelers was the first in the industry to create a customer retention program when it launched One-to-One in 1995, and we redefined the program in 2002 based on our research on how to build customer loyalty,” he says.

According to Lacher, Travelers also helps agents grow through its Agency Operations Workshop. “In this workshop, we provide qualified agents with practical advice on strategies such as account rounding, marketing and customer retention to attract and retain profitable business through simple, yet effective steps that work in the real world,” he says. “Participating agents have been shown to outperform their peers by three to five percent in policy growth.”

So far, more than 1,000 agents have taken this training course, and the program has been so successful that its architect, Lloyd “Skip” Daigle, assembled the material into a primer titled “Breaking the Code.” The primer is an easy-to-read, commonsense collection of “do’s and don’t’s” in which the author brings the business of running an insurance agency back to basics. And, he pulls no punches. Here, for example, is Daigle’s view on agency growth.

“Unfortunately, most agents themselves don’t know how to grow their business. They don’t know how to grow because they don’t track their customer growth. They don’t, for example, have a systematic procedure for monitoring where their business comes from, how much of it is generated from their centers of influence, including referrals from friends, family or ring-clangers. If you don’t know how you’ve gotten where you are, how can you get to where you want to go?”

The primer also contains testimonials from agents who have attended Daigle’s workshop and who have found it useful in many different ways.

“Agents become zealots after attending Skip’s workshop,” says Lacher. “He doesn’t preach Travelers’ view of the world, instead he instructs agents on what they need to know to remain profitable. We’ve had a long-standing bias that independent agents are our partners. We recognize how important they are to our business and we are committed to continuing to invest in helping our agents grow.” *

For more information:
Travelers Personal Lines
Phone: (800) 776-0099
Web site: www.travelers.com