C.5 Customer Support Services and Capabilities The registry provides a clear, concise and efficient deliberation of customer support responsibilities. Registrars provide support to registrants and registries provide support for registrars. This allows the registry to focus its support on the highly technical and administratively complex issues that arise between the registry and the registrar. C.5.1 Technical Help Systems NeuLevel will provide the registrars with the following types of technical support:
Web Portal NeuLevel will implement a secure Web-based multimedia portal to help support registrar operations. To obtain access to our Web-based services, a registrar must register his registrants with us, and must have implemented our security features, including SSL encryption, log in with user ID and password, and digital certificates for authentication. The home page of the web portal will include a notice to registrars of planned outages for database maintenance or installation of software upgrades. This notification will be posted 30 days prior to the event in addition to active notification including phone calls and email. We will also record outage notifications in the help desk database to facilitate compliance with the service-level agreement. Finally, seven days and again two days prior to the scheduled event, we will use both an email and a Web-based notification to remind registrars of the outage. Non-affiliated registrars and the general Internet community may obtain generic information from NeuLevel's public Web site, which will describe our TLD service offerings and list ICANN-certified registrars providing domain-name services. Central Help Desk In addition to implementing the Web site, we will provide telephone support to our registrars through our central Help Desk. Access to the help desk telephone support is through an automatic call distributor that routes each call to the next available customer support specialist. We will authenticate callers by using caller ID and by requesting a pre-established pass phrase that is different for each registrar. Requests for assistance may also come to the Help Desk via email, either directly or via the secure Web site. The Help Desk's three tiers of support are:
In turn, the Help Desk uses an automated software package to collect call statistics and record service requests and trouble tickets in a help desk database. The help desk database documents the status of requests and tickets, and notifies the Help Desk when an SLA threshold is close to being breached. Each customer-support and technical support specialist uses our problem management process to respond trouble tickets with a troubleshooting, diagnosis, and resolution procedure and a root-cause analysis. Escalation Policy Our escalation policy defines procedures and timelines for elevating problems either to functional experts or to management for resolution if they not resolved within the escalation-policy time limits. The following table is an overview of our escalation policy.
Staffing Initially, NeuLevel will staff its Help Desk with a complement of customer service specialists. We will add staff as necessary to respond to incoming requests within the service-level agreement. Customer-service specialists will obtain assistance from NeuLevel's technical staff for any problems that cannot be resolved in one phone call. Test and Evaluation Facility NeuLevel will establish an operational test-and-evaluation facility that will be available for registrars to test their client XRP system. Our technical-support team, which consists of functional experts in the processes and technologies for domain-name registration, will support the registrars' testing. Once each new registrar is satisfied that its system is compatible with the registry system, it will schedule a formal acceptance test that will be monitored by our system engineer. After a registrar has passed the acceptance test, we will issue its user id, passwords, and digital certificates, and the registrar can begin operations. Customer Satisfaction Survey To determine registrars' satisfaction with registry services, NeuLevel will implement a Web-based customer-satisfaction survey that will consist of a set of survey questions with responses ranging from one to five on the Likert Scale. We will tabulate the results and publish them on the Web site. To further verify the quality of our customer
services, NeuLevel will commission a biannual customer-satisfaction
survey by an independent third party. Comments concerning the layout, construction and functionality of this site should be sent to webmaster@icann.org. (c) 2001 The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. All rights reserved. |
