Rick Heffernan, former Vice President of Experience & Marketing for Personal Insurance (PI) and current Vice President of Experience & Marketing for Bond & Specialty Insurance, leads a team responsible for ensuring that the company delivers great experiences across the customer journey – from engaging customers through targeted marketing initiatives to ensuring overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

In his role in PI, Rick’s team embodied the Travelers #ThinkCustomer approach, which aims to meet our customers where they are, give them what they need and serve them how they want. The company executes this approach by developing and implementing the tools and capabilities that help its employees deliver value in the eyes of the customer.

When Travelers first introduced the idea of #ThinkCustomer, the company looked at businesses that were best at providing great customer experiences. It learned that there is a strong correlation between the success of those brands and their companies’ focus on customer centricity. Rick explains, “We began by asking our leaders in PI to complete a self-assessment on whether they use customer data and insights, or other tools, as part of their decision-making process. This assessment helped our team build a road map and prioritize areas of opportunity for becoming more customer-centric.”

Rick believes that establishing and maintaining points of contact with our customers and providing them with an outlet to express their wants and needs help to future-proof our organization. “By consistently listening to our customers and incorporating their feedback into our services and products, we will continue to secure Travelers long-term success,” he says.

When asking Rick about other initiatives that are helping create sustained value at Travelers, he says he’d be “remiss not to mention our American Forests partnership, which was inspired by the company’s planting 1,000 trees in 2016 to offset the carbon footprint of the Travelers Leadership Conference – an annual gathering we host for our large agent and broker partners.” At the time, Travelers was encouraging more customers to go paperless and decided to plant one tree for every PI customer who converted to paperless billing. As of 2025, we have funded the planting or conservation of more than 7 million trees across 19 U.S. states and Canada through our partnership with American Forests.

In addition to the clear environmental benefits of encouraging customers to go paperless, Rick explains that the initiative:

• saves Travelers significant costs associated with printing, mailing and handling paper documents;
• enhances the company’s efficiency by enabling faster processing and most secure storage of digital records; and
• benefits customers by offering timely digital updates and access to documents anytime, anywhere.

Travelers is the sum of the value that each of our employees delivers. With our employees’ work through our #ThinkCustomer approach, along with other initiatives such as our American Forests partnership, Travelers is positioned as a leader in sustainability. Rick states, “Those seemingly small contributions, when multiplied by 30,000 employees, significantly enhance Travelers every day.”