Lindsey DiGangi fully understands how to leverage multiple perspectives in the pursuit of shared business goals. For her, every victory is a multi-team win.
As vice president of field operations and marketing for Pennsylvania Lumbermens Mutual Insurance Company, a mutual insurance company dedicated to the wood products, lumber and building materials industries. DiGangi is responsible for new business production, from filling the pipeline to driving submissions and winning new business.
In her 12 years with the insurer she's held roles in five different departments, including underwriting, IT, marketing and now field operations: that broad experience has taught her that regularly collaborating with thought leaders from additional departments such as marketing, IT and other key functions is essential to the company's success.
"Being able to learn about our processes from multiple vantage points gives you context that helps in creating stronger strategies across the company, rather than in just one department," she says. "Understanding how we do what we do as an organization, from all different angles."
One example of this type of cross-departmental initiative is the mutual insurer's successful recent lead-driving campaign. "We're a niche, specialty carrier, with more than 100 years of supporting lumber and woodworking companies. Yet, we wanted to know, what's the full scope of our penetration?" she says. "What is the full universe of potential business, and how can we support it?"
They soon learned the wood industry "was much larger than even we knew, constantly growing and evolving," she says. "It opened up a full new prospecting list for our business development reps to use, to meet [prospects] where they are."
Through the use of resources shared by its reinsurance broker, Guy Carpenter, DiGangi's team was able to identify more than 100,000 lumber-related sales prospects. Working across departments, PLM seized the opportunity to create unique marketing and communications campaigns to drive targeted outreach and prospecting.
Since that project began at the end of 2023, the insurer has received 411 submissions from those leads, which has led to 80 new business accounts and nearly $5m in new written premium.
DiGangi is also a strong advocate for using the company's CRM as a central, strategic intelligence tool, incorporating data from Marketing, IT, Business Development and Customer Service to create a more valuable overview of each client.
"Our collective knowledge hub is really our competitive advantage," she says – not only for ensuring the organization's client data is comprehensive, but actively using it for targeting, communications and retention.
The key to securing buy-in across departments for such a project, DiGangi says, is transparency. "To drive change, you really have to understand the perspective of those different departments," she says. "Change has less resistance when people feel their voice is heard in developing solutions – their pain points, their priorities. It can't be one-size-fits-all; you need to present a solution that helps that specific group of stakeholders. Explain how it's going to help us, as an organization, and here's how it's going to help you."
DiGangi also led the shift in using the insurer's Net Promoter Score (NPS) to create a fully integrated, enterprise-wide initiative to enhance its customer experience, employee engagement and internal processes. While many companies use NPS at a single point of interaction, PLM addresses the full policy lifecycle, collecting feedback at multiple touchpoints including claims, loss control and customer service, as well as through quarterly surveys. Under DiGangi's watch, that NPS data has been integrated directly into the company's CRM system, empowering staff across departments to deliver more personalized and proactive service.
"On the day-to-day level, it may feel that we're always competing on price – and it's easy to forget how much of a people business this is," she says, which is critical due to the company's operational structure as a mutual company. "NPS lets us know how we're competing on the 'people' side. It shows what our stakeholders really care about, and we can continue to get feedback along the way that we can build off of."
DiGangi is the youngest officer in Pennsylvania's Lumbermen's 130-year history, a fact that's never lost on her. Having started with the company as an intern, she remembers what that felt like – and she's eager to demonstrate that for young employees, a variety of opportunities exist. "Our company embraces change and diversity, and being part of that is incredibly rewarding," she adds. "It helps show the next generation that there's a path for them."
