Do other LIRs experience this??
The waitqueue is indeed very long. My last assignment request (admittedly large) got its first response 9 days after it was sent to a hostmaster from the wait queue.. Next response was 5 days later. Eventually it was approved 16 or 17 days after the initial request. Now, I realise the request wasnt standard, but it's a bit long :) (i dont blame the hostmaster in question btw!).
From dealing with the opposite problem towards our customers: they have been complaining that it takes to long to get answers and solutions from us. We
An interesting quesion here is how the NCC ticketing system organizes the wait queue and what happens when a request is getting too old (and what is realy too old ?). then introduced a new trouble ticket system, Action Remedy Request, to get better statistics ond what is going os. We have so far seen that a majority of the time on the requests not soleved within 8 hours (which is the internal target we have set for normal requests) is waiting for customer feedback or are unasigned. The trouble then is to get thoose requests in front of the queue so that the customers thinks we are responsive to her request. The real trouble lies with customer satisfaction though, because it seems to be that some customers are dis satisfied with our service if we mail them back with further questions. My personal gut feeling is that this is because they then do not understand the questions mailed back or don't see their relevance. And the strange thing is that if they are adressed back trough a phone call this disatisfaction does not occur. Then they think we are concerned. (Wi did two customer surveys one before we changed the system and one after the new system was introduced, and the overall results got slightly worse :-(, but we got better feedback in some of the areas we focused on. So this is by no means easy or rocket science... Another important thing for us was to introduce something like a trouble manager, when a request was floating around in the system assigned or unassigend to some resouce group for more than a certain time limit, a dedicated person should get notified to take action to bring in the correct expertise. Some of this may be relevant for the RIPE NCC. Maybe just looking about the algorithms for organizing the incomming requests and followups will solve some problems ? -hph