Travelers' Kristin Shumway is bridging gaps: WIL NEXT 2022

Many consumers have experienced being on the phone with a company and having to explain the issue they’re calling about multiple times to multiple people, or give an agent basic information multiple times. Kristin Shumway, senior director of software engineering at Travelers, makes it her mission to prevent that experience from happening to the carrier’s policyholders – and to make their experience with the company better than expected.

“If you log onto our website, have a chat, and then end up calling in, you want the call center rep to know what you just did online or where your chat left off with your online representative before you switched over to a phone,” she says. Shumway uses the concepts of “event-driven architecture,” omnichannel and digital enablement to build systems that can accomplish that coordination of communications and information.

Omnichannel technology connects the various means of communication – email, phone, online chat – for consistency. Event-driven architecture means the structure of the communications and software technology is set up to work with a single event (such as a claim) in all avenues – by digitally enabling the necessary functions. Shumway supervises a team of 36 engineers, scrum masters, and agile product owners that build the systems to handle the different elements and link them together. She joined the company in 2011. Before her current role, she was lead engineer in the company’s omnichannel program. 

“It was very positive in how we integrate different systems, and that ended up spinning off to become a little bit bigger than just the omnichannel and to help other areas of Travelers outside of customer communications leverage a similar platform to share data among their systems in real time,” Shumway says. She gave an example of how this manifests in Travelers’ operations.

“There’s nothing more frustrating than your phone [service] being done at 5pm and now you have no way of contacting the company,” she says. “Offering multiple channels at multiple hours of the day is important and then streamlining the customer experience through that. “In omnichannel, if you call our call center, one of the first things we would do is check and say, ‘Do you have an open claim?’ If so, you’re probably calling about that claim. So let’s not make you as a customer tell us that you’re calling about the claim.”

With that established, Travelers technology or staff can send the policyholder in the right direction. “That’s all about making sure the real time data is in the systems, so they can make those kinds of decisions and streamline that customer experience as they’re going through the communication,” Shumway says. 

Leading staff on projects like modernizing communications interfaces with customers, Shumway says the best leaders she’s seen “can bridge the gap between the business side of the house and the technologists so they understand where technology is right now, what’s up and coming, and how we might take advantage of it.”

Leaders “connect the dots” to solve business problems or open up opportunities, she adds. “Through that, they inspire their teams to deliver toward the ultimate goal,” Shumway says. “It’s a combination of vision, inspiring your team and then empathizing, which underlies all of that with both your customers, your employees and any other stakeholders you have.”