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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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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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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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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We have been working on interactive projects since essentially its popular birth (around 1995) and the one constant has been change. I like to tell stories about the first time I sliced an image or not having layers in Photoshop, it blows the newbie’s away but I tell it over and over to reinforce the concept of change because it never ends. You have to keep up.

Change is frustrating and tiresome, so they come to someone like us and ask the general question “How do we make it better?”

I always counter with this question in return, “What is your goal?”

They are often taken aback because they haven’t thought about a goal. Most think of a website as a two dimensional product like a brochure or a printed ad but the beauty of the web is that it has many layers, many facets and the goal can be so different for each client.

I have often said that with enough time and money anything can happen on the web but unless there is a goal and that goal is met, nothing was accomplished.

My advice is that before you ask the question, set the goal and make sure you measure the success toward that goal. A good partner will help with all this, our team will have done their job and that is to make you happy.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us and hopefully this was helpful.

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SEO (search engine optimization) is important so that search engines can evaluate your site to provide back results to people that are searching for you through Google, Bing, Yahoo and the others.  It is not however the end-all, be-all and is somewhat intrinsic to the basics of maintaining your website.

Years ago, search engines were not as smart as they are now and used “meta data” to help sort things out.  This data consisted of keywords, phrases and descriptions hidden at the top of the page.

Although we don’t know exactly how the search engines work (if someone tells you they do, they are lying to you) we do know basics like keeping information fresh, writing good content, using the proper tags, making sure people are linking to you, social media, that will improve your results in searches.

So going back to “is this important”, yes its important but not as important as constantly feeding your site and using it to its fullest.  There is also industry research that indicates around 70% of clicks come from organic results and not paid search advertising.  Pretty amazing right?

Proper SEO is not something you buy but is a process and yes there are tools to help. This is a race not a sprint.

One more thing, if someone tells you they can guarantee you anything with an SEO program other than improvement, they are lying.  TBD has gotten more business from clients that were burned by these fly-by-night SEO shops that anything else.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us and hopefully this was helpful.

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TBD will offer logo design, web design and interactive consulting services to Infinity’s over 3000+ affiliates throughout the country.?  Through the InfinityPerks program, agents are given information and offered services to help improve their business in this tough economy.

TBD Creative is proud to be partnered with Infinity Insurance.

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TBD provided design and standardized development processes for the new site. Crystal Mountain required a visual and robust site that could showcase their products as well as give them the ability to update content with a customized content management system.

Expect great things as we continue to evolve this site to take and manage orders and payments in the future through a fully integrated online tool.

Crystal Mountain 100% Natural Spring Water is always pure and fresh, and it comes to you directly from its pristine sources from springs throughout the Tennessee Valley. The company is based in Huntsville, AL and is known worldwide for its award winning products.

TBD Creative, Inc. is a woman-owned new media development and consulting firm based in Birmingham, Alabama. The firm provides interactive design and new media consulting, as well as traditional marketing, advertising, and online media planning.

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