CUSTOMER PROFILE
KeyCorp’s roots trace back nearly 200 years to Albany, New York. Key is one of the largest bank-based financial services companies in the United States. Key provides deposit, lending, cash management, and investment services to individuals and businesses in 15 states under the name KeyBank National Association through a network of approximately 1,000 branches and approximately 1,200 ATMs. Key also provides a broad range of sophisticated corporate and investment banking products, such as merger and acquisition advice, public and private debt and equity, syndications, and derivatives to middle market companies in selected industries throughout the United States under the KeyBanc Capital Markets trade name.
2,500 agents, 1,000 on NICE EEM
- Migrate to cloud solutions without loss of functionality
- Improve employee flexibility and engagement
- Improve scheduling and forecasting accuracy
- Easy-to-use interface for rank-and-file employees
- Fast, accurate AI forecasting
- Wide range of self-service scheduling options
- Responsive professional services to maximize enterprise return on investment
KeyBank serves a geographically diverse base of depositors and borrowers across nearly 1,000 physical branches, and remotely with over 1,000 agents in the United States. A company-wide initiative to replace on-premise software with cloud solutions caused a dramatic loss in functionality for the contact center.
A second migration, this time to NICE cloud solutions, not only restored missing capabilities but empowered KeyBank leadership and employees to perform better and have greater flexibility.
01 THE BEFORE
Coast-to-coast footprint creates challenges
With total assets in the top 25 nationwide, KeyBank is a regional bank with tremendous reach. Over 1,000 agents, both in-house and outsourced, serve a customer base spanning from Alaska to the East Coast. Yet scheduling was dominated by time- consuming manual processes, and available schedules were inflexible compared to peer organizations.
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
A cloud migration misfire
KeyBank was is in the midst of a strategic initiative to migrate from on-premise to cloud solutions whenever possible. In the contact center, KeyBank initially elected to stay with its incumbent workforce management provider, Genesys. This quickly proved to be a mistake, as its cloud offering omitted several features the bank needed. “Their cloud was not robust enough to meet our workforce management needs. We were basically taking 20 steps backward,” said Adam Hahn, KeyBank Department Manager.
One of the most damaging issues was the loss of features and functionality related to forecasts and granular schedule management. “It was untenable and we needed to start looking for other workforce management solutions.”
“There was nothing close to Employee Engagement Manager in our previous solutions, so we were very happy to get our hands on that. EEM was one of the biggest draws of NICE. We’re saving analyst hours and overtime hours, and that helps my team reallocate resources to make sure we meet service levels.”
DEPARTMENT MANAGER
KEYBANK
03 THE SOLUTION
Superior workforce management capabilities in the NICE cloud
As part of a larger enterprise deployment of NICE CXone Mpower, KeyBank implemented NICE IEX Workforce Management to improve the sophistication and flexibility of agent scheduling. “NICE IEX Workforce Management offered everything we already had on- premise, and better,” Hahn said.
KeyBank professionals performed the seven-month migration in conjunction with NICE Value Realization Services. “VRS was with us every step of the way and very responsive to our questions and concerns,” Hahn said. “Anyone who has the opportunity to partake in VRS really should, it’s been the best part of our 18 months with NICE.”
To make agent self-service more natural and compelling, KeyBank also chose to deploy Enhanced Strategic Planner(ESP) for long-term capacity planning and Employee Engagement Manager. “There was nothing close to Employee Engagement Manager in our previous solutions, so we were very happy to get our hands on that. EEM was one of the biggest draws of NICE.”
With improved workforce management capabilities and an intuitive way to manage several scheduling tasks on their own, KeyBank professionals adapted quickly to the NICE solution. Users reported that the NICE interface was more natural and easier to navigate than KeyBank’s previous systems. NICE also makes it easier for agents and team leaders to visualize their time-off options and allocations, leading to a smoother experience and more flexibility for employees.
Today, KeyBank can offer its agents a wider choice in schedule intervals because NICE can forecast and schedule with greater precision and automation. KeyBank is also able to allocate agents into more granular groups based on roles and local labor laws and can control feature access based on need. This helps the bank with work rules enforcement and, in turn, simplifies labor practice audits.
04 THE RESULTS
Significant gains for all contact center stakeholders
Switching to NICE restored much-needed functionality in forecasting and schedule management. For employees, the ability to bid for PTO on a self-service basis is a key upgrade from past systems. VRS helped KeyBank accelerate the implementation and rollout of self-service PTO bidding, an implementation that saves the company considerable manual processing time. Overall, schedule generation is about five times faster than on the previous system. “We used to do PTO bidding by hand in Excel,” Hahn said. “NICE’s self-service PTO bidding saves us literally hundreds of man- hours at our busiest time of year, and that’s just awesome.”
Leadership enjoys stronger reporting capabilities and improved forecast accuracy based on more complete call data. As a result, KeyBank has logged a full year of monthly wins on service level, abandon rate, and ASA. Other NICE features earning high marks from KeyBank associates include schedule swaps and automated flex-time. “EEM is making it so much easier to have the right staffing from day-to-day, and to quickly adjust if we’re running a little bit of a surplus by offering associates to grab their own time-off,” he said. “And it’s phenomenal having our teammates engage and interact with their own schedules in a user-friendly, hip way.”
Since implementation, agents have given strong and consistent engagement with EEM, which overall gives KeyBank greater capacity to meet call demand. “We’re saving analyst hours and overtime hours, and that helps my team reallocate resources to make sure we meet service levels.”
05 THE FUTURE
Greater efficiencies and more self-service flexibilities on the horizon
Substantially faster contact center data ingestion with NICE has set KeyBank on the path to near-real-time processing, which will help the organization further adjust forecast models and methods. The contact center organization is also planning to share insights and lessons learned with other KeyBank teams to help promote wider efficiencies. EEM will soon be rolled out on mobile apps, making it easier for employees to manage their schedules from anywhere.
NICE’s cloud solution is also expected to help KeyBank accelerate its efforts to create proof-of-concept experiments for AI-powered capabilities, which otherwise would have required six months or more of internal IT effort.
