Alternative delivery may have some unforeseen advantages.
With the help of a "virtual" call center, KeyCorp has pulled through a freak early-winter storm that dumped up to 50 inches of snow on the greater Cleveland area this week.
Operations specialists at the $63 billion-asset bank vow neither snow squalls, nor power losses, nor airport closings will keep them from their appointed duties.
"We've been through floods, snow, earthquakes," said Patrick J. Swanick, executive vice president of Key Services Co., the operations and electronic delivery unit that services branches sprawled across twelve states.
"We've basically had to build a bulletproof environment."
The bank's four call centers operate on a common computer platform, which lets KeyCorp, in the event of a crisis affecting one site, route customer calls to another facility.
Mr. Swanick said the system worked well this week, as calls from Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio were rerouted from KeyCorp's Cleveland center to one in Auburn, Wash.
The four call centers - two others are in Dayton, Ohio, and in Buffalo - handle a combined three million customer calls a month.
"We have insulated the call centers by networking them together," explained Mr. Swanick.
"Call center personnel are cross-trained to handle calls from anywhere. Customers don't even notice."
KeyCorp's experience is instructive to other banks, consultants said. "It's a day-to-day problem; just the magnitude is different," said Francisco Sauza, senior consultant at Speer & Associates in Atlanta. "You need to make sure you have your technology, people, and plans working together."
Other areas of bank operations are more vulnerable to weather, consultants noted. For instance, check processing relies on clear streets and open airports to deliver checks and cash letters on time.
However, with this storm, KeyCorp had few problems with check processing. Luckily, the storm hit on a holiday weekend, and when the bank began processing checks in its Cleveland facilities on Tuesday, the city already had begun to dig itself out, Mr. Swanick said.
"We've gotten quite good at this," he said with a chuckle. "But we're always trying to improve. It's keeping us busy."
