Seychelles Postal Services unveils new services |10 June 2019
The ribbon cutting ceremony
To keep pace with the pressure and demand for more services, the Seychelles Postal Services (SPS) has started to revamp and add new services to suit it clients.
In a ceremony held on Saturday morning under the theme ‘We are moving Forward’, the SPS in Victoria unveiled three new services; its new customer care centre for comments and suggestions, a new SMS booking service for the collection of parcels and a new gift shop.
SPS also took the opportunity to showcase its new red and black uniform to be used by the staff in a few months.
The cutting of the ribbons to open the Customer Service centre and the re-opening of the Philatelic Souvenir & Gift Shop were made by the Minister for Finance, Trade, Investment and Economic Planning, Maurice Loustau-Lalanne and the chairperson of SPS, Melanie Stravens.
This was in the presence of the principal secretary for Finance, Damien Thésée; the chief executive of SPS, Errol Dias; deputy chief Alex Etienne; SPS staff and other guests.
During the ceremony, SPS also presented its first batch of community representatives who will deliver mails on its behalf in the district, a new initiative to help improve its current delivery system.
The new Customer Service centre is situated in the space previously allocated to the souvenir gift shop while the perfume scented Philatelic Souvenir & Gift Shop is now located on the north side of Liberty House on Albert Street, facing Maison De Mahé. The space was made available by the Ministry of Finance.
In his opening speech, Mr Dias said the new developments at SPS and those to come later will ensure continuity to improve delivery of services to the public as for the past months SPS has had to deal with many complaints from the public regarding delays in receiving their items.
He further said that he hopes the new procedures will make mail delivery quicker and that the new shop should also provide SPS with new streams of revenue and help offset the increasing cost of operations.
Mr Etienne for his part said that with an advance digital and technical world, expectations grow towards that direction and SPS has to adapt itself to meet those expectations.
He said the changes happening and those to come will benefit both clients and staff of SPS.
He further noted that the Customer Service Centre will give SPS the opportunity to better understand the expectation of clients and thus help it to deliver a better service.
Mr Etienne said as part of its effort to improve service facilities, the SPS will be offering a parcel management system where clients will get update track details of their incoming parcels. This system will work parallel with a new booking system, with number 9646 via the SMS, for clients to collect their parcels.
He noted that this booking system, to be introduced, will give a specific time for collection, hence reduce the amount of time clients have to wait to receive their items as these will be ready before hand.
Clients are currently using SMS to collect their parcels at SPS and Mr Etienne said that it will also curb the influx of clients who used to come down for collection at any one time.
Mr Etienne further said that getting community representatives in the delivery job will help to address the public concern of letters not being delivered or unappropriately delivered.
SPS has employed six part-time postal workers in some districts on Mahé for the delivery job.
“Most of the time I get to deliver letters that the postal workers have left at the community centre as they do not know the place or person and also of letters delivered to the wrong address that some people come with at the community centre to be returned to the post office. I seized the opportunity for the delivery job when I learned of this initiative as I have been doing this routine for some time now,” said Carol Dubel from Roche Caiman.
As for the new souvenir gift shop, he said the area is more spacious with a wider range of items for sale. It will be linked with its new revamped website, to be launched soon, where through its e-commerce service, clients will be able to purchase products from the gift shop on-line.
Other service facilities to be on offer in the future will be the virtual mail box system where a client can come down to collect mails at the counter or have them sent to home or work places via a given code number as option to the PO Box system
“I am very happy with the new developments happening in our organisation and I think all of us should be happy with the changes that are happening. This shows that we are moving forward as our theme says. We are a little bit better off now than before in terms of our image and work environment,” said Bruna Johnson, a senior postwoman who has been working at the SPS for 29 years.
