In an effort to make the business of doing business easier, Verizon Business today announced expanded e-bonding capabilities and an enhanced customer portal for large business customers and government agencies.

These specific announcements are part of an overall effort on the part of Verizon Business intended to make the company more competitive by using technology to solve common customer problems and enable customers to do more self-service, said Mark Chodoronek, executive director of customer enablement for Verizon Business.

“We want to reset the bar in terms of self-service applications available through multiple mediums,” he said. That includes the e-portal, which is Web-accessible, e-bonding using industry-standard XML interfaces to tie customer systems directly into Verizon’s infrastructure and using electronic data interchange (EDI) to pass billing information from Verizon’s infrastructure to the customers’, so raw data can be sorted and turned into useful reports.

“Our whole focus has been to take service capabilities and push information into easily accessible and secure formats that expand the control capabilities for customers of our products and services,” he said.

To that end, Verizon Business has updated the dashboard on its Verizon Business Customer Center to provide customers more sophisticated views of their networks, including topology maps posted down to the device level, Chodoronek said. “They can see the performance of their products and services worldwide,” he said. “They can look at all the potential faults or repairs or troubles that may exist. They have the ability to place orders and do moves, adds, changes and see maintenance taking place, whether pre-scheduled or not.”

The company has also added document management capabilities to the portal, to include contracts, enabling electronic access to and transfer of key information.

“It allows a customer in the utilities program to generate a conference call from the portal, look at a directory of telephones, look at contact numbers, share documents and update documents in a secure fashion,” Chodoronek explained. “That can include their contract as well. They can share that with their lawyers and do redlining back and forth until it is complete. We want to allow a free flow of information using this document center and capabilities. From a global order perspective, customers can place orders globally and see the status of those products in a near real-time basis, with updates at the sub-five-minute level.”

Customers can also now track trouble tickets globally and click on a trouble ticket to see its current status, he said.

To make e-bonding easier, Verizon Business had introduced an eBonding Implementation Toolkit that simplifies the process of getting started, and created an eBonding Center, a new online service that allows customers to securely monitor their eBonding transactions.

“We allow customers to do e-bonding in four convenient ways,” Chodoronek said. “They can build a direct interface from their infrastructure to ours using industry-standard XML, and the Web Service Definition Language, which essentially creates a pipe between the systems that has security and translation capabilities. Or they can do what we call ‘ebonding in a box’, where we provide an adapter, and we have already pre-programmed for the WSDL and XML interface, and the customer plugs into the box behind our firewall and can turn up e-bonding much quicker.”

The third method allows enterprise customers who have relationships with third-party telecommunications expense management firms to ask Verizon Business to do direct ebonding with those firms, he added. Verizon already has partnerships with six major TEMs.

With this week’s announcements, Verizon is adding a fourth e-bonding method, Chodoronek said. “We allow the customer to go through the portal and, underneath the resources tab, go into the eBonding Center and download user guides for technical assistance or find help and a contact button for technical support. We can communicate with them in real time and provide the assistance they need.”