It’s been a while but I just have to write about how blessed we are to be in the South and Birmingham in particular.

We have a great group of internet professionals and creatives in Birmingham and it’s a shame that many of them are having a hard time getting work while hacks are being imported to the city to consult with our businesses. Now, don’t take this the wrong way, I have plenty of work to do and love the people that I work with but this is just ridiculous. I don’t have enough digits to count how many times over the past few years that “intelligent” business people decide to use firms from outside the city rather than pump dollars into the local economy.

There are fantastic firms locally that I know personally, Cayenne Creative, Scout Branding, Provenance Digital, & Intermark not to mention countless others that I know I am forgetting. (Sorry guys!)

So come on Birmingham businesses, support your local firms! They will work hard for you and probably use your services down the road.

One other thing, many of the folks from the “Big Firms” out of state, put crappy people on your account because they don’t think very highly of you.

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One of the first things I worked to introduce as VP of eBusiness at Regions Bank was the idea of a repeatable consistent process.

At first glance, you might think that a bank, especially a 140 billion super-regional was chocked full of process and you are correct.  The problem I encountered was a consistent and repeatable process that worked across all groups and throughout the organization.

As I set about this task, I looked around to find a process that existed that may work for us.  There were paper processes, excel (the scourge of progress) processes, automated lotus notes processes, executive processes from the 1800′s and so many more.  I needed one that worked for me and my group.

Let me explain the need and I will use the website content change control process as an example.

After determining the lay of the land and realizing that changing the bank would be like turning the Titanic we isolated our pain points.  Those are as follows:

• Line of business partners that fed us the content.
• Our group was responsible for the integrity of the content.
• Audit and compliance required that we be able to document change on the site in 2 places.
• High volume of change with limited resources.

So now we know the requirements.  Once these are established, now you can create the solution with a goal of being repeatable and consistent.

After weeks of the concept, review, revision process, we finally came up with a plan that worked for us.  Now my goal of implementing the process across the entire organization never happened but for us, the process we instituted worked and is still working today at Regions.

Briefly, the process was this.  We defined our content “Champions” in each line of business that owned the content.  They submitted the change through an online tool called “Ontime” (great tool). Once submitted, the request came into a queue and was reviewed and given one of 4 change “level”. These levels were correlated to the amount of work and time it would take to complete.  Level 1&2 communication were handled through the “Ontime” tool and all others were treated as a full-on project with a project manager assigned.

It was consistent and repeatable and everyone knew what was going on.  And audit and compliance were happy.

This was the benefit of working toward the solution of a defined goal with requirements and what any good leader will do.  They do not take the easy way out and try to institute one process for all but take the time and find a solution that is consistent and repeatable.

Shall I repeat myself…. Consistent and Repeatable.

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TBD Creative Inc. Opens Doors on New Interactive Consulting Firm — New Company Headed by Former Regions Financial eBusiness VP

Birmingham, AL (PRWEB) April 22, 2010 — Years of creative energy and experience in the interactive sphere will now form the foundation for a new Interactive Consulting Firm, headquartered in Birmingham. The new firm – TBD Creative – is headed by Drew Smith, former VP of eBusiness at Regions Financial Corp.

The group will primarily focus on helping financial institutions understand and implement new technologies that will enhance their current online presence, increase customer satisfaction and contribute ROI through cost reduction and revenue generation. The firm also offers interactive consulting in design, development, usability, and social media and related services to businesses outside of financial institutions.

As the principal of the new company, Smith will oversee the groups efforts. Smith’s experience includes leading customer experience initiatives for all interactive and web properties for Regions/AmSouth Bank for the last decade. The initiatives he championed involved redesigns of regions.com and amsouth.com, intranet development for both companies, ATM interaction, and mobile and online banking experiences. In addition, Smith led projects that continued process improvements for bank content management programs and provided leadership on initiatives that improved bank applications based on usability studies and focus group feedback.

Prior to joining Regions, Smith led the interactive creative direction for consulting and advertising firms by working with corporations throughout the southeast. He holds a B. A. from the University of Alabama in Telecommunication and Film, which led to his early career in television and film work.

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In my previous life at the bank, we had a unique case that I always like to share to show the power of our services. Its pretty amazing and I hope you enjoy.

Let me set it up. For years, my responsibility was everything but online banking. Yes, we had input on the design but overall, it was handled by a completely separate group at the bank. Once the online banking became part of my responsibility, we made an effort to meet with the call center monthly and review complaints by volume.

One of the first issues to bubble up from these meetings was that we were receiving a high number of calls regarding the password reset for online banking. People were locking themselves out and calling in to get help. I will rough the numbers here but they were somewhere in the 5000 calls a month range and averaged over 15 minutes in length. That is a lot of time lost once you determine the hourly pay and the amount of productivity lost. Somewhere around $85,000 a month in lost productivity dollars.

We went to work. We listened to our customers to determine the issues, did focus groups and usability studies to review our solution and make sure we knew that it would be effective. These simple tactics proved very effective and cut a 19 step process down to 3 very intuitive steps.

It only took roughly 3 weeks of work and limited development time to implement the change. Once changed, we monitored calls through the call center and analytics to make sure that we didn’t miss something.

In our next months review with the call center, analysis showed that we had reduced the number of calls for password reset to nearly 1000. Further analysis showed that the reduction had resulted in around a 60-70k a month productivity save for the company. Not to mention the customer satisfaction measures increased significantly for our online channel over time.

These results were incredible and show that using the right processes and techniques can make a significant difference to your bottom line while increasing satisfaction.

Let us help you. Contact us today for more information.

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Trinity Methodist was looking for a simple way to extend their online presence into the realm of social media and TBD Creative was more than happy to help.

The Trinity Methodist website is a fully functional cms-driven tool that allows them to make changes often and reach their members efficiently.  They also continue to create printed materials and mail them for their older members.  Its what they are used to and how they prefer to receive information.  The recognized gap is that although they are meeting the needs of most, some like to receive information through facebook and twitter.

We worked with Trinity’s communications director to set up both a twitter and facebook fan page as well as a communication plan to deliver information through these channels.

On the first day of fan page creation, they nearly doubled their fans and twitter followers continue to grow.  Trinity is more than happy with the consulting services that we were able to provide to get them started and will continue to evaluate growth as well as adjust as needed to evolve the program.

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