Financial services company Metavante reports saving at least 500 hours worth of staff time every month - the equivalent of about three full-time positions - since it started using AT&T's Electronic Bonding automated trouble-ticketing system.

AT&T has been developing this system as part of its Business Direct automated customer service initiative for 15 months and officially unveiled the effort at SuperComm 2003 last week in Atlanta. Chairman and CEO David Dorman says AT&T is investing $500 million this year to streamline service ordering, provisioning, trouble-ticketing and billing.

AT&T has built what it calls the Business-to-Business Interface, which is essentially an XML-based gateway that links customer systems to the carrier's network operations center (NOC). This interface is the crux of AT&T's E-Bonding service. Through this gateway customers can take advantage of automated trouble-ticketing, initiate tests to fix problem circuits, and order more bandwidth or new circuits.

Metavante, which offers a real-time financial service to 5,100 large banks and financial companies, operates a frame relay network with about 5,000 nodes. The company is an E-Bonding early adopter that AT&T has worked with for the past year.

Before Metavante started using E-Bonding, issuing trouble tickets - including diagnosing the problem and restoring a circuit - took 30 to 90 minutes on average, says Brian Hurdis, CIO at the Milwaukee company. "Now it takes a couple of minutes," he says. In an average month Metavante places 1,000 trouble tickets.

Metavante now spends just more than 30 hours per month dealing with trouble tickets, compared with 500 to 1,400 hours per month before it linked to AT&T's Business-to-Business Interface.

"Our goal is to use Web technology to fundamentally provide [users] with an improved customer experience," says Bob Sloan, vice president of e-sales and services at AT&T.

While AT&T is not the only carrier to offer a customer-service Web portal, it is believed to be the only one providing direct connectivity between its NOC and customer databases, says Lisa Pierce, an analyst at Giga Information Group.

"Automation is really important, not just with trouble ticketing, but with billing and provisioning," Pierce says. Automation lets users and carriers reduce the amount of time they spend on administrative duties, which in turn reduces costs.

But taking full advantage of the service requires a lot more than simply signing up for AT&T's E-Bonding.