1997 — Page 444

Page 444 of 654

Page 444 of 654

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# HONG KONG PROVISIONAL URBAN COUNCIL

names---with the names of government officials come first in ceremonies— while acting sloppily in the discharge of their practical duties.

In fact, my original speech is about the Standing Orders of Urban Council as to whether the Chairman should make two votes on the same issue. As I intend to bring this up in our future regular meetings when the opportunities arise, I will not speak on this topic now. These are my remarks.

Ms. Carlye TSUI (in Cantonese):- Mr Chairman, with a history of over 100 years of service to Members of the public and after the historic changeover of sovereignty of Hong Kong, the Provisional Urban Council seems to have gone through a seemingly rocky half year. While we had our normal work schedule, such as building a central library, launching a national treasures exhibition, addressing the problems of street traders, regular development of various environmental hygiene, markets, cultural and recreational programmes, we had to deal with unexpected outbreaks of problems associated with contaminated vegetables, bird flu, etc. In these processes, differences in issues, heated repeated debates and confrontational arguments, both within the Council and between the Council and the Urban Services Department, have surfaced. One hopes that after going through the difficult times, the Council will arrive finally at healthy solutions in providing better public service.

In addition to the above, the call for a review of the structure of district and municipal organisations has posed the question on the role and value of this Council and warrants a great deal of energy in a soul searching and practical assessment. Regardless of the structure of boards and councils, a municipal organization must be a dynamic service organization. Regardless of any threat of unity crisis or existence crisis, this Council must change dynamically to meet the challenges of recent and future times. Towards this end, I would like to address three major aspects of change.

Firstly, a change of focus in 'customer values'. How well do we understand our customers' needs and what matter to them? Traditionally, organisations use customer satisfaction surveys to gauge performance levels and similarly this Council carries out regular benchmark surveys and after-event customer evaluation. Most of these traditional surveys concentrate on how satisfied customers are after purchase or transaction and do not address the real attributes that customers value. The first key to success in customer service is to know the customers' values well and then to adjust ourselves in satisfying their needs. In order to develop excellent service and bring the Council closer to citizens in urban area, we should be concerned with what values matter to our customers in addition to the current measurement of the extent of customer satisfaction and how they rank the various services provided by this Council.

Our customers cover a wide spectrum of rates-payers; thus we should have a variety of programmes to ascertain the array of values. With hundreds and thousands of service types offered by this Council, there is the need to segmen