Maintaining and enhancing trust is fundamental to the work of the Land Registry. We rely on many different relationships to deliver services successfully to the community. Our aim is to create partnerships of trust that help to give better service to all. We depend on our customers for feedback on the quality of our services and ideas for improvement. We listen carefully to them and seek solutions that help customers as well as achieve our objectives. We therefore have a number of communications channels, both formal and informal, helping us to maintain an open dialogue with our customers. We have a dedicated Management and Customer Services Division that is responsible for planning and coordinating customer service.

As part of the Land Registry’s ongoing commitment to adding values to our services, the following initiatives have been completed in the year.

Customer Centre

A dedicated Information Counter has been established in our Customer Centre to handle enquiries and receive feedback from customers. The Customer Service Manager is also accommodated there to receive customers and listen to their comments. A Customer Service Hotline has been set up to provide users with help desk support for using our new services.

The Queuing Display System at the Customer Centre was further enhanced with the installation of an electronic ticket machine to enable queuing and diversion of customers for different types of search services in a systematic and orderly manner.  As a result, the customer flow at the Customer Centre is further streamlined and the queuing time shortened.

The Urban Owners Incorporation Unit has been relocated from 28/F to the Customer Centre at 19/F of Queensway Government Offices in January 2006.  This final move completed the Land Registry’s plan to provide one-stop service at the Customer Centre to any customer.

Delivery of instruments

To ensure secure delivery, all registered instruments and stopped deeds are returned to the lodging parties by courier service. Customers can also make use of our Customer Service Hotline to enquire the status of the instruments lodged for registration.

With effect from 1 August 2006, the service hours for delivery of instruments for registration will be extended from Monday to Friday each week. The new service opening time is 9:00 a.m. (previously 9:30 a.m.) and the service closing time is 1:30 p.m. (previously 1:00 p.m.).

As the IRIS Online Services becomes more widely used by the general public who are infrequent users, the Land Registry has tailor made a Training Tool-kit and a User Guide for such ad hoc users. Both of these were uploaded to our website in September 2005.

To enhance customers’ skills in using the IRIS Online Services, we organized two free briefing sessions, one at elementary level and the other at advanced level, in February and March 2006 for members of the Customer Liaison Group (Private Sector). The briefing sessions provided a good forum for the Land Registry staff to share experience with the day-to-day users of the IRIS Online Services, to update them with the latest upgrade and development of the services and to gauge the feedback from users.