Postal services comfortable despite competition-seminar
Alternative means of communication are not a serious threat to postal mail services, participants at a one-day workshop on ‘quality of service continuous testing’, held in Dar es Salaam, concurred yesterday.
They said that, the other options of communication, such as mobile phones and e-mail services, which are cheaper and faster, have only affected personal mails while business mails have increased.
“Alternative mails have affected postal services negatively, as our core service is mails, but while ordinary mails have decreased, business mails and parcel posts have increased,” said Mr Brian Mwansa, a participant from Zambia.
Tanzania Posts Corporation (TPC) Manager- Mails Business, Mr Protas Mwageni said that the increase of business mails was attributed to growth of businesses in general and big numbers of people using postal services.
In his opening remarks, the acting Postmaster General of TPC, Ms Bertha Mallogo, said that the need for quality grows under fair competition and that quality of services constitutes a driving force in postal services.
“Improvement of quality and raising of the level of efficiency in postal services is our obligation and this workshop will facilitate the mail transmission times facet of the process,” Ms Mallogo told the participants.
Mr Mwageni added that the quality of postal services in Tanzania were of high quality internationally, delivering mails four to five days a week while domestic mails are delivered within 48 hours due to overnight mails services offered by TPC.
“Any letter posted by 6pm will be delivered on the same day due to the service, mostly reaching destination the next day,” prided Mr Mwageni.
The workshop was organised by Universal Postal Union (UPU) aiming at training participants from Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Sudan, Seychelles, Ethiopia and the hosts Tanzania, on the use of continuous testing with the goal of improving postal services quality.
