The health and safety of Citizens staff, our business partners and policyholders are of utmost importance to us. Citizens continues to monitor the latest developments related to the spread of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) health risk. To lessen its spread, Citizens has encouraged all Citizens employees to work remotely. Based on our emergency plans in place, we do not anticipate this decision to have a negative impact on our ability to service your agency and provide a high level of service to our agents and policyholders. We affirm our commitment in an email to our policyholders (who have email addresses on file), and it will be sent over the next few days.

As we enter these challenging times, Citizens remains committed to continuing the agency, policy and claims support you have come to expect. Please be assured that while you may not be seeing us in person over the coming weeks, we do intend to connect virtually – by phone, video conferencing and webinars – as much as possible to continue to push our shared business goals forward.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis has signed Directive 2020-01. Per the directive, the Florida Department of Financial Services will not enforce the provisions of Florida Statues 626.7352 and 626.7354(4), which restrict a customer representative’s ability to transact insurance outside the offices of a licensed agent or agency, until May 8, 2020.

Resources

To assist in our service to you and our customers, please note the following:

• The toll-free phone lines to the Citizens Customer Care Center remain open and available for customers and agents.
• Personal Lines and Commercial Lines Underwriting staff also are standing by to address any special circumstances you may have related to COVID-19. If you need support for an individual customer impacted by this event, call 888.685.1555 or email us using the Contact Us page from the Agents site.
• Citizens offers many convenient premium payment options, including online and pay-by-phone. Visit our Payments page for more details.
• We encourage our policyholders to use myPolicy, our self-service and smartphone-friendly tool, to:
  • Submit a claim online
  • View policy, claims and billing information
  • Submit premium payment under certain conditions
• As always, policyholders can report a loss or receive the status of a claim by contacting our 24/7, toll-free Claims Reporting Center at 866.411.2742. Agents can call 888.685.1555 to report a loss on behalf of their customer.
• Our Claims division remains fully operational and ready to respond to new claims and settle existing claims.
• Agency Services will continue to support agency staff changes, buy/sell requests and all other inquires.
• Agency field managers will not plan any office visits until further notice; however, they remain available to provide advocacy and support.
• Our agent webinars will be held as scheduled. Recordings of these events will be available on our Webinar Recordings page, which is accessible under Training on the Agents site.
• For agency management support, email agent.outreach@citizensfla.com. Include your agency name and address.
• Citizens will continue to post information about our response to COVID- 19 on our Coronavirus page and social media.

We understand how disruptive this event can be for your agency, and we want to work with you to reduce the negative impact on the customers we mutually serve.