>>LESLEY COWLEY: Okay. Thank you, Chris. Apologies. I feel as though I'm talking rather than a lot today. It wasn't my intent to have a lot of air time, and I will try and be quiet tomorrow. But I did volunteer to make a presentation on the latest developments in dot uk because there's been rather a lot of them that may well be of interest to cc's as well.
I'm going to talk briefly about the latest developments covering the dot uk market, the scope of Nominet policy, technical excellence and service excellence, and endeavor to get that all within my 15 minutes.
Looking at the -- the U.K. market, we have some statistics for you there because I know we're all fascinated by statistics and percentages, but it's fair to say there's a very healthy U.K. market.
And one of the things we've been really focusing on recently is: Why is that?
We have a very healthy economy in the U.K., a very healthy e-business growth, increasing broadband penetration, and dot uk itself, as a brand, has become increasingly well-known.
Quite interesting that we talked about IDNs earlier, but influenced by cat. I have part of the U.K. such as Wales and Scotland that are now interested in either their own gTLD or second-level domain under dot uk, so my learning point from that -- and I believe it's quite good to try to give other people some of the hindsight things that we have now realized in time -- it's really important to develop a better understanding of the market and the factors and issues that may well develop and impact upon your future growth or, indeed, negatively on your future growth. And I think it's very easy when you're working in this sort of environment to focus on today's problems, and they tend to leave little time for thinking about the future. And that's a learning point for us.
The week before last, we changed the -- the scope of Nominet, and that was a significant thing for us. The scope 10 years ago, set up by Willie Black, who a number of you know and I worked with for many years, was very, very narrow, for good reason. We didn't have the trust of the U.K. community. It was very much viewed as an experiment at that time and, however, it did mean that we were unable to respond to people who were asking us to do other things. In particular, to run the registry for U.K. ENUM that will be put out for bids shortly.
And unfortunately, part of the constitution meant that we needed to get a 90% vote in favor of that change.
I would not recommend a 90% vote in favor of anything in future.
[Laughter]
>>LESLEY COWLEY: It does sound a bit witty, yes.
It was there to protect us, but we then found it actually limited our future. But thankfully, after a great deal of work, we got that change through with a very slim margin.
And one of the things that influenced that, and I think may well become an issue for other cc's, is about registrar participation.
Generally, in member votes that we have, in registrar votes that we have, we have about 10% participation. It took a lot of work, a lot of phone calls, and a lot of e-mails, to double that to 20%, and what we see is that people generally, if you are running things reasonably well and they believe they don't need to interfere, over time they stop participating and, therefore, when you need them to participate, that's very much a challenge.
So anyway, we made the change. We will be bidding for other opportunities when they arise. We're very excited about that internally.
So my hindsight take from that is really check your own constitution and just be mindful if it may actually will -- may actually prevent you from making changes in the future, and don't, for goodness sake, build in a 90% requirement.
Looking at policy in the U.K., we have now got a much faster policy development process. Like many people, our policy development process is quite well established and has developed over time, and the natural tendency is then to add things to that, as opposed to subtract, and so we found that it was taking a very, very long time to actually implement and develop policy on some quite simple issues.
Anyway, we are discussing IDNs. That discussion is still going on. I think it started about 18 months ago. We are consulting on improvements to our dispute resolution service, and I highlight that because I know a number of you have used our own service as a basis for your own.
In particular on that, the discussion is about generic names. We're seeing an increase of disputes on generic names.
And we have a number of discussions planned, including phishing, access limits, registration periods of longer than two years, which follows the gTLD developments, domain naming and dropcatching. There is a very long policy work list and my learning is that the number of policy issues you have will always exceed your policy capacity. And so that's why it's important to look at the process and see how that can be, acquisition possible, but equally can still involve your community in that process.
Technical excellence is another area of much development for us, and thankfully, because I'm not a techie, I have Jay Daley in the audience here who is presenting on Thursday as well. Be nice to him because it's his first ICANN meeting.
And Jay has been leading a whole series of developments on the technical side towards Nominet becoming a center of technical excellence. And just a flavor of those are highlighted there for you.
My learning point as the chief exec is that technical excellence is something you never actually get to. It is a moving target and it does require a significant and ongoing investment of both time, money and end resource. And if anything, I think Nominet uninvested in our technical capacity in previous years and that's something that very much takes a lot of catching up and I think we have caught up, but there is still considerable work there.
Service excellence is another major theme for us. We have been running customer satisfaction surveys for a number of years which basically ask the normal "are you happy with the service you get" questions. But one of the developments we have implemented over the last couple of years is to develop what we call an index and that looks to link the issues that are most important to your customers with how happy they are about them.
People may have an issue, for example, about how your Web site looks but it may actually be more important to them to be able to navigate that Web site. So we try to capture the various things that are important to our customers, and those are the ratings that we have as a result.
We have also introduced a thing that's called a mystery shopper. I don't know how many of you are familiar with that. But basically that means somebody rings up our support team or e-mails our support team pretending to be a customer and goes through the entire query process and we provide a script for that so the people aren't aware that this is a mystery shopper.
And then they are able to give direct feedback to the staff and to the management as to the experience they had as a mystery shopper which has been very, very useful for us in terms of identifying ways in which we can improvement and, for example, one of the major things that came out of that is the speed at which people answer the phone, but also how friendly how the staff sound seems to be more important in some respects with the quality of advice that they got, which was quite interesting.
We've also won a number of awards. I am not highlighting those in order to brag about them, of course, I could do. But I think there has been quite an opportunity that maybe we missed as a company before in terms of benchmarking your company against others and seeing where you can improve.
But, also, the effect that winning an award or being short listed for an award can actually have on the staff and the team concerned and how it actually makes them recognize that the work we are doing is of a standard comparable to other companies in the U.K. and best practice.
And we invest a lot in staff training, external courses is in the region of ?,800 per staff member for those of you that like that sort of benchmark. And that excludes in-house training, and we do a significant amount of in-house training.
For me, there is a key learning here that the more you invest in staff, the more you ensure staff motivation, the easier it is to improve the satisfaction of your customers. And that may be a bit obvious to people but it took us a while to get those dynamics and that process happening. Thank you.
