AFRINIC's Member Services Department is the first point of contact for many AFRINIC members or those seeking to become a member. In 2015, the department was restructured and split into two units – the Registration Services (RS) Unit and the Customer Services (CS) Unit in order to streamline AFRINIC's services. The CS team deals with membership request administration and service support to AFRINIC members and prospective members, while the RS team focuses on all aspects of Internet number resource request evaluation and delegation in line with the current policies as proposed and accepted by the AFRINIC community.
Committed to Excellence
As part of AFRINIC's quest to serve the community in a timely and efficient manner on all issues relating to its core activities, the Service Level commitment (SLC) v1.0 was published in November 2015. The SLC describes the level of service that can be expected from staff and covers Registration and Customer Services as well as Database and public online services, Reverse DNS, Billing and services infrastructuresIt also aims to ensure that all parties (AFRINIC staff, members and community) have the same understanding of intended goals:
- Simplifies complex issues
- Reduces areas of conflict
- Encourages dialog in the event of disputes
- Eliminates unrealistic expectations
Welcoming new members on board
The New Membership Registration Portal (NMRP) was released in 2014 and provided a simpler and more efficient registration process for prospective members. Version 2 of the NRMP was recently released and updates include End-user fee calculation, IPv6 fee calculation and encryption of documents uploaded.
Dealing with Requests
The department receives around 10,000 tickets in the Hosmaster queue and 1,000 tickets in the new-member queue per year (see Ticket Statistics for more information) and 98% of tickets received each month were responded to within an average of 43 hours, complying with the AFRINIC SLC which stipulates responding to queries within 48 working hours. Further, with its ongoing process to better handle members' needs and queries, the Member Services department has recruited two additional dedicated customer-oriented staff. Additionally, to improve service delivery, the Member Services Team in collaboration with the IT department will implement the new Whois version 2 which will include few innovative features.
Find out more about the Member Services Department and how to become and AFRINIC member here.
