Travelers
Built bridges of cross-functional collaboration across various divisions in a large organization
Travelers is a 165 years old insurance company with strong expertise in personal, business, specialty, and property-casualty insurance. It has nearly 30,000 employees and 13,500 independent agents & brokers in the US, Canada, the UK, and Ireland.
The Opportunity
The challenge was to collaborate & network with cross-divisional leaders within a big organization, create a common design system, and also empower agents with marketing guidance.
The Solution
I led the cross-functional collaboration with multiple organizational stakeholders and introduced an integrated design approach to bring together various external marketing, technology, e-learning, branding & internal marketing projects spanning across divisions.
The Impact I Created
As Senior Director of creative, I guided a team of UX designers, writers, freelancers, digital agency vendors, and strategists from other marketing & technology divisions. The total size of the cross-functional team was ~30, and my role also involved coordinating & working alongside 3 outside digital agencies.
What was accomplished
Value-driven design governance across the enterprise
Increased agent satisfaction & exceeded Travelers’ expectations in terms of the number of agents who completed the training modules.
Agents’ positive feedback and quick adoption of the new digital training program allowed more modules to be built for the year.
Board member in the Travelers’ Digital Center of Excellence leadership team
Synchronized ‘Prepare & Prevent’ project with incremental global site UX design updates while overseeing & working closely with AOR ‘Sapient’ to provide feedback and approvals
Increased awareness of various thought leadership content in the risk space
Facilitated cross-departmental collaboration by challenging the status quo & getting buy-in across functions, solidified relationships & led change management.
Cultivated new work opportunities by collaborating with senior leaders across multiple divisions, defining & refining product vision & value proposition
Significantly reduced development costs and agent training time
How I helped accomplish it
Mentored & managed the digital design team through shared experiences & honest conversations, enabling their consistent professional & personal growth
Stayed up-to-date through regular team meetings & personal 1:1s while discussing challenges, trends, priorities, and development & learning opportunities
Showed poise while navigating complex organizational structures and processes in a large insurance firm
Developed strong collaborative partnerships with key internal stakeholders, including leading cross-functional task forces on Agent training modules and Prepare and Prevent.
Created alignment among leaders across various departments, focusing efforts on the most impactful initiatives & communicating reasoning & urgency.
Collaborated with 3 external agencies to keep up the momentum, leading to timely project completion and best outcomes
Led data-driven discussions on Prepare and Prevent, ensuring that data is leveraged to deliver a great customer experience.
Delivered innovative design solutions to continually raise the bar on functionality, flow, consistency, usability, and simplicity
Built awareness around the understanding and appreciation of human-centered design in the enterprise marketing teams
The Projects I Led
Agent Digital Training Academy E-Learning Modules
We designed a series of training modules for the Travelers’ portal, empowering agents with digital marketing guidance and the ability to market themselves.
It Starts with You U: Employee engagement and communication
“Secure. Respected. Cared For” is the driving value proposition of the Travelers’ Personal Insurance Claims team. My team created “It Starts With U” as a fun and engaging virtual place of higher learning where every PI employee can feel not only like an invested alumni but also part of the solution.
Social media marketing
Key Takeaways
Foresee the future
The site content and architecture update was a significant step forward in helping users meet their needs across all of their devices. We were confident that the system of story groups and prioritization we had created would allow us to continue evolving the experience in the future.
Users are at the center of the design
We had designed an experience that was rooted in highlighting what users felt was important to read and what they wanted to read. The data played a key role in making content and design decisions.
What people I worked with have to say
"Himanshu can really dig into a digital user experience challenge and explore valuable ways to solve a particular problem. His counsel on strong UX options and solutions always brings a much-needed POV. One of his best qualities is his easy-going approach which makes collaboration much more productive and enjoyable. Lastly, he is very astute when it comes to clever ways to use digital and social media towards a marketing objective."
John H Bell, President & Chief Strategist at NextNow Digital
"I've had the pleasure to work with Himanshu in two different settings: first at Modem Media, where he was a "go-to" resource for interactive technology, and most recently at Travelers, where we collaborated on several conceptual engagements.
I really appreciate the determination that Himanshu brings to the design process. He can work quickly to meet deadlines when he needs to and manages other designers well, but what I most admire is how he takes the time to really understand the underlying goals behind an engagement from as many different angles as possible. This always leads to a stronger design."
Chris Shafer, Executive Director - Product Experience Design at MResult
"I had the pleasure of working with Himanshu on two high-profile projects while he was at Travelers. He was dedicated to getting the creative “just right” and was articulate in sharing his vision with the customer. He also offered ideas beyond what was requested to show how the creative could be expanded into different media. I found him easy to work with, inclusive and collaborative."
Deb Susca, Director - Content Management at Travelers
"At Travelers Insurance, I have had the pleasure to work with Himanshu on several creative projects. As a digital partner supporting our sales and marketing efforts, Himanshu was instrumental in the design, development, and implementation of a critical online training initiative to expose our distribution channel to the value of digital marketing through the creation of a series of short self-paced online training modules.
As one of the Project leads, Himanshu showed great leadership and creative acumen by helping design a powerhouse series of training modules that included best-in-class online techniques like interactive quizzes to reinforce learning. This, coupled with a curriculum design that provided how-to steps and immediate ways to begin using Digital Marketing for online advertising buying, SEO, email, and Social Media, has been instrumental in improving the marketing skills and options for our distribution channel.
Success was in no small measure due to Himanshu’s extraordinary technical skills in his ability to create online creative training concepts that provided an optimal user experience for either PC, Tablet, or mobile environments. In addition, his ability to work successfully across multiple departments and provide the glue to connect the needs of all parties made it possible to cost-effectively launch this important series of training modules.
I consider Himanshu to be a go-to person to successfully solve and deliver any unique marketing challenge in the digital space."
Miguel Tillman, Senior Director - Marketing Communications at Travelers
"I worked with Himanshu for a short time at Travelers, but in that limited time, he impressed me as a strong and passionate art director and designer. His UX capability was excellent too, and I think some of his web design work done for the enterprise group at Travelers was among the best of any artists I worked with there."
Brian Carlson, Vice President - Content Marketing at Travelers
"Himanshu was great to work with. He has the ability to provide innovative ideas for creative projects while at the same time, adapt to organizational constraints and sometimes burdensome bureaucracy. He was very responsive, organized, and creative - a terrific combination."
Sperry (Weiner) Mylott, Senior Director - Corporate Communications at Travelers
"I had the pleasure of working with Himanshu while at Travelers Insurance within our in-house creative agency. As a part of the Accounts team, working with an experienced designer like Himanshu was great. On both marketing and advertising campaigns, Himanshu was able to bring thought leadership, innovation, and design expertise to the table - which always satisfied our internal client's needs. Any team that has a chance to work with Himanshu is lucky!"