Postal Service making strides

Editor: I wish to respond to a letter appearing in the October 22, 2004 edition of your paper, under the caption “St Vincent postal service behind time,” signed by one HJA.

HJA wrote that s/he visited the main post office in Kingstown and spoke with seven employees and was informed that “an International Reply Coupon was not available for sale in St. Vincent” (sic.) and the Grenadines. {{more}}That information is correct. In the letter, HJA implied that we are obligated to sell these coupons. That is incorrect; our obligation under the Universal Postal Union (UPU) – not International Postal Union as written by HJA – is to exchange (NOT SELL) these coupons for postage stamps valued at the lowest airmail rate.

This service is offered currently at our main facility in Kingstown. Management of the Postal Corporation has begun to make arrangements to offer for sale the International Reply Coupons as an additional service to our customers.

I wish to indicate that since the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Postal Corporation was established in October 2003, the new Board of Directors, management, and staff of the Corporation have been working tirelessly to improve and expand our postal services. During the month of October, we celebrated one year as a corporation. Our observation over the past 12 months indicates that we have made measurable improvements in all areas of the service that we provide. We have arrived at this position based on our constant dialogue with our customers as well as making improvements in many of the benchmarks that we established to measure our own performance.

Consistent with our new operating environment, our medium term strategic plans are to make continuous improvement in the delivery of our service in all areas. Our ultimate objective is to create one of the most efficient postal services in the world. We are committed to achieving this.

We are aware that our task will be much easier if we do so in close partnership with our customers. In this respect we are endeavouring to inform our customers about all our postal services and to learn from them ways in which we could improve our services.

Apart from making ourselves available to talk to our customers, we have installed a receptacle in the lobby of the Post Office and made forms available so that our customers can comment on the quality of our service. We welcome constructive criticisms, as they can only help us improve the service delivery and our financial

position.

We welcome comments and suggestions from all our customers because we place a high value on them.

J. Celene Jack Director of Postal Services