In 2019, KeyBank embarked on a multiyear strategy to improve its contact center, the Cleveland-based bank's primary client assistance hub.
"We had a great three-year strategy," said Amy Brady, chief information officer and head of the bank's technology, operations and services. "And then the pandemic hit."
Call center workers began to work from home, and that turned out to be a good thing. It meant a wider geographic pool from which to recruit and greater employee retention, Brady said.
"Our attrition rate this year is running at about 19% at contact centers, where industrywide that typically is between 35 and 60%," Brady said, noting that this is a stressful and high-turnover job.
"People typically don't call a contact center because they're happy," Brady said.
To improve employee retention and morale, KeyBank has shied away from traditional customer service metrics like the amount of time spent on the phone with each customer, which Brady said can pressure a worker to get someone off of a phone call quickly.
KeyBank has also rolled out internal advancement programs for its contact center team including "TechReady," which teaches customer service workers coding and other software skills. So far, TechReady has trained 97 employees, with the majority of them moving to associate software engineering positions within the bank's technology and operational services departments.
Handling the contact center is one of several divisions Brady oversees. She leads nearly 5,000 employees, and reports directly to KeyCorp CEO Chris Gorman.
Starting last year, Brady created a technology group administrative office, which handles her team's communications, events and the diversity, equity, and inclusion program.
One of Brady's DEI initiatives has been to encourage women and people of color to enroll in TechReady. Of the inaugural TechReady class, 57% of the participants are people of color and 49% are women.
Also in 2022, Gorman gave Brady the responsibility of running the company's corporate real estate solutions with a mandate to reduce KeyBank's physical footprint by 30% over the next two years.
Brady said that cuts in real estate can be accomplished partially by trimming office space as opposed to branch shuttering. That office space includes KeyBank leasing several floors of a 57-story building in downtown Cleveland and property in neighboring Brooklyn, Ohio. Brady also noted that KeyBank, which operates in 14 states, has opened branches in upstate New York, Utah and Colorado in 2023.
"There's consolidation but there's absolutely places where we're building new [spaces]," she said. Brady said that she is focused on striking a balance between "creating spaces that people want to come to work at" and advancing KeyBank's new digital tools.
One digitization project is promoting MyKey, a three-year-old consumer-facing app. MyKey uses artificial intelligence to answer basic customer questions, Brady said, and in turn decreases the calls handled by the contact center.
Brady has been KeyBank's chief information officer since 2012, and, in that time, she has taken an active interest in Cleveland civic activities. This includes a recently completed four-year run as chair of the board of trustees of Playhouse Square, a performing arts space with 46,000 season ticket holders.
Brady kept the center fiscally afloat during the pandemic, and she led the search for Playhouse's current CEO Craig Hassell, formerly of London's Albert Hall.
"He had never heard of Playhouse Square, had never worked in the United States before, so this was a big deal for us to get him," Brady said.
She also noted that she helped push Ohio House Bill 33 into becoming law, which includes up to $5 million in tax credits for Playhouse Square theatrical productions.
In addition to Playhouse Square, Brady's external leadership roles include being on the board of directors at DuPont, where she is on the audit and environment, health, safety and sustainability committees.
