RE: Abuse response [Was: RE: Yahoo Mail Update]

[<michael.dillon () bt com>]

> So, to bring this closer to nanog territory, it's a bit like 
> saying that all the sales and customer support staff should 
> be given enable access to your routers and encouraged to run 
> them on a rotating basis, so that they understand the 
> complexities of BGP and will better understand the impact 
> their decisions will have on your peering.

We encourage managers, designers, engineers, project managers, etc. to
spend a day handling customer support calls so that they understand the
impacts of their decisions/work on the customer, who ultimately pays our
paychecks. We run even more people through workshops where they spend
some time listening to recorded customer support calls, and then plan
how to prevent such problems in future so that the customers don't feel
the need to call us. Of course, none of these people are expected to go
in and reconfigure BGP sessions on routers, because there are working on
first-line support. One of the duties of first-line support is to sift
through the incoming and identify which cases need to be escalated to
second or third-line support. 

Unless you have very good automated systems in place to ensure that the
abuse desk only gets real cases to deal with, then you should be able to
rotate managers and other employees through the abuse department to do
some of that first-line sifting. If the outcome of this is that you make
a business case for changes to abuse-desk systems and processes, then
you should involve the abuse desk staff in this development work to give
them some variety. Once those staff have automated themselves out of a
job, you can move them to some other tools development project, or
incident response work.

--Michael Dillon