Moving to a new place can be both one of the most exciting times in your life and one of the most nerve-wracking. Part of the process involves updating your contact information with the many accounts that you have with different companies and institutions. You need to move your cable TV service. You need to update your credit card information. You need to update your WHOIS information.

If you are a service provider who requests the mailing address and other contact information from your customers, it is in your best interest to make the “change address” function as seamless and easy to do as possible. If your website is already set up with a self-serve function, that can be a huge plus for consumers. However, there is one other element that should be included.

Customers always appreciate it when they can post-date their account changes to some point in the future. By doing so, they can take their time to update their addresses days, weeks, or even months ahead of their actual moving day. That removes one more stressor from the process of moving from one home to another; that’s one fewer thing crunched into the day or two it takes to move.

Even if you don’t offer a self-serve function on your website for account updates, it is important to have this kind of feature implemented in your CMS solution. A customer should be able to call in advance and have the mailing address updated for a future date.