KeyBank enhances client experience and operational efficiency with WalkMe

KeyBank, a U.S.-based financial services company, wanted to digitize key banking workflows for its commercial banking clients to meet evolving digital preferences and enhance operational efficiency. As the organization undertook this initiative, it partnered with WalkMe to introduce intuitive digital adoption solutions, enabling its clients to seamlessly navigate the platform and enable self-serve via the organization’s online banking portal.

With WalkMe, KeyBank developed a robust digital adoption approach that focuses on guiding clients through complex processes and encouraging self-service. Their approach led to self-serve completion rates increasing by 150% or more for key workflows and a 90% self-service adoption rate among targeted clients. The organization has also reduced support ticket volumes and processing times. WalkMe enables the company to quickly release updates, proactively validate data entry and prevent errors, increase team productivity, and take a data-driven approach to continuous improvement.

With its digital adoption strategy, KeyBank drives clients to authenticated digital channels, promotes fraud awareness via targeted in-app messaging, and delivers solutions to combat potential fraudulent activity. Building on their success on the commercial banking side, KeyBank extended these strategies to its consumer banking platform as it continues on its path to deliver digital-first experiences for its clients.

As the financial industry rapidly shifted towards digital platforms, KeyBank decided to elevate its service model by enhancing digital adoption across its commercial online banking platforms — but this transition presented a unique set of challenges. KeyBank’s commercial banking clients need to execute a diverse set of actions with multiple levels of permissions, and many processes involve several nuanced steps and can be time sensitive. The company wanted to continue offering a white-glove experience to customers, while meeting the needs of customers who increasingly want to self-serve.

Clients were accustomed to a model where they engaged with in-person or phone support to complete complex transactions. A thoughtful approach was needed to ensure that the human element of customer service was not lost, while also meeting the evolving needs of digitally savvy clientele.

“Industry statistics tell us that commercial clients prefer to self-serve, and we wanted to address their preference and empower them with the right guidance,” said Eboni Ewart, Digital Adoption Manager at KeyBank.

With frequent industry regulatory updates and new online banking platform enhancements on the horizon, the company needed the ability to communicate new capabilities and updates to the right clients, and to quickly implement solutions.

“We knew what it would take to move to a more digital, self-service model, so we set out to find solutions that would help us reduce barriers to adoption. We needed the ability to assure our clients and provide resources and tools right when they needed guidance,” said Ewart.

KeyBank turned to WalkMe to enhance its banking platform’s front-end experience and guide customers through complex processes, promoting self-service and improving operational efficiency. The team started with one of the most common workflows: adding new users. Clients often need to add various team members, from controllers to clerks to accounts payable to accounts receivable. Historically, clients would contact their account team or support to complete this process, leading to numerous help inquiries per month.

The digital adoption team implemented a WalkMe solution that promotes a digital add user flow and automatically completes the process for clients. This dramatically simplifies the task for users and has reduced ticket volume by 80%. Additionally, the team hyper-targeted top clients to promote new digital options for completing the add user process, leading to a 90% adoption rate among the invited clients.

As new platform features become available, the company uses WalkMe to hyper-target the affected users, communicate the capabilities in real time, and then automatically guide them through the process of setting up the necessary services. The company has found segmentation to be useful for time-sensitive communication as well.

“Segmentation is a game changer for us,” Ewart said. “We segment almost everything. For us, it’s one of WalkMe’s most powerful features because we can get so specific with who we target, why, when, and for what.”

The team also cites the agility WalkMe gives them as a key benefit. When KeyBank needs to implement temporary guidance, the organization can easily create WalkMe content that sits on top of the user interface. Once the guidance has served its purpose, they can remove it just as easily – eliminating the need for the tech team to go through the more involved process of developing and launching updated platform code. These augmentations have freed up time for the tech team to tackle other high priority items for their clients. “WalkMe is not a tool that works against or competes with the technical team, but enhances what they’re able to do, and fills in when their priorities are elsewhere,” Ewart said.

Additionally, the digital adoption team can build WalkMe content that solves immediate needs while IT teams work on platform updates that require longer development cycles. For example, during tax time, KeyBank discovered that a specific tax payment form field was case sensitive and blocked customers from submitting payment if completed incorrectly. The digital adoption team built, tested, and deployed a field validation in a matter of hours to prevent such errors and ensure clients could quickly and accurately complete the workflow. “We can use WalkMe to create fast solutions that add tremendous value to our clients,” said Ewart.

KeyBank also uses WalkMe Insights to optimize its digital adoption strategy and continuously improve client experience. With Insights, the company monitors the drop-off rate for workflows to discover friction points and develop user-friendly guidance.

Since implementing WalkMe as part of its digitalization strategy, KeyBank has improved client experience and team productivity. Self-serve completion rates have increased (including by 150%+ for the add user workflow), data validations have proactively prevented 100% of submission failures, and overall, WalkMe solutions have eliminated the need for clients to contact support for guidance, saving valuable time for clients and internal teams. For example, with in-app guidance and automation, client support requests for the add user workflows have decreased by 80%.

With its digital adoption strategy, the KeyBank team drives clients to authenticated digital channels, promotes fraud awareness via targeted in-app messaging, and delivers solutions to combat potential fraudulent activity. The organization’s data-driven approach also ensures continuous improvement and better client outcomes.

“WalkMe has significantly improved our digital strategy by enhancing client experience, cost efficiency, risk management, and team productivity. Its intuitive solutions have streamlined processes, resulting in improved user interactions, and enabled us to introduce new products and capabilities to our clients within our platform,” said Ewart.

WalkMe empowers the team to quickly ship fixes and updates to keep up with rapid changes across the business. “Our team can often develop a WalkMe solution to address an issue in a couple hours, and that’s really, really powerful. Those real-time adjustments are just spectacular, said Ewart.

Building on the success in the commercial space, KeyBank has started using WalkMe on its consumer banking platform. The company plans to drive self-service utilization even further, with the goal of being able to reinvest the team members’ time to more value added client relationship activities and reducing inefficiencies.