KeyBank Improves Employee Experience with New Internal Search Engine

Moving into the digital age presented a new customer service challenge for KeyBank, a $90-billion-asset bank that is more than 160 years old. It’s internal search engine for pulling up customer information from Keynet, its internal knowledge base, was old, slow and difficult to use.

As the bank digitized more and more key internal resources and information for servicing its customers, it became increasingly difficult for the bank’s employees to find that information quickly using the search engine, says Jim Wozniak, KeyBank’s infrastructure engineer in charge of maintaining and supporting the bank’s IT environment.

[See Related: KeyBank Enters New Agreements to Improve Cards and Payments Offerings]

For instance, employees looking using the internal search engine to pull up a specific branch typically had to sift through search results that listed all of KeyBank’s branches, which number in the hundreds, Wozniak notes. Employees usually had to seek out other internal sites, or even contact customers to obtain customer information that the bank already had. This was a point of frustration among the bank’s employees, Wozniak recalls.

“Employees were taking precious time away form their primary responsibilities to gather this information… It was clear we had to make a switch [to a new search engine],” he adds.

After exploring a few different solutions, the bank’s enterprise architecture group picked Coveo’s Advanced Enterprise Search solution to replace its old system. The solution had cutting edge indexing capabilities and Coveo offered expert support that impressed KeyBank, Wozniak explains.

Wozniack describes the implementation as pain-free -- the bank added some new Virtual Machine servers to house the platform and made some TEM and IIS configuration and HTML coding adjustments and the search engine was up and running. The implementation took two months from the end of the first quarter of 2013.

The Coveo engine offered new indexing and taxonomy capabilities that enabled easier access to internal information such as security policies, inventory management systems, asset management systems, technology related information and HR materials, Wozniak reports.

While employees shied away from using the old search engine, averaging only eight searches an hour across the whole organization, with the new solution in place, Keynet is getting 1,500-2,000 search requests per day, according to Wozniak. “Our employees have saved time and can do more to serve our customers, build better products and increase profit,” he remarks.

To help employees transition to the new search engine, Wozniak and his team wrote up a user pdf guide and included it on the search page in Keynet, he says. They also provided an internal mailbox for employees to send questions and feedback on the new solution. The large increase in the number of searches that employees are making with the system shows that they are already comfortable with using it, Wozniak notes.

The bank still has room to grow though with the Coveo solution, and Wozniak says he would like to explore using the solution to search other internal resources, such as email, cloud networks and shared network devices.

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Jonathan Camhi has been an associate editor with Bank Systems & Technology since 2012. He previously worked as a freelance journalist in New York City covering politics, health and immigration, and has a master's degree from the City University of New York's Graduate School ... View Full Bio