Deactivating Customers Who Moved

[tdbarnett]

Hey Everyone,

I would like to see what best practices are out there to deactivate customers who have moved out of our service area. We have a list of them that we want to make sure to remove from any marketing, however, we still want to hang on to their property data and service history. Any recommendations?

[JessicaSmith]

The CUSTOMER should not change (unless you know their new address). The LOCATION can have the name changed to "sold home" or "New homeowner" or something.

Customers are people, and therefore their address can change but their name/the person cannot.

Locations are houses, therefore their address cannot change but their name/the customer they are linked to can.

I like this process if you know someone has moved- have a customer called "Customer Moved". Leave the CUSTOMER information alone on the person who moved (unless you know their new address- if so, update the customer account address). Change the name of the LOCATION to "New Homeowner". Pin a note on the location with the name of the old owner. Edit the LOCATION to link it to that placeholder customer you have and unlink it from the old customer.

Then, when the new owner of the location eventually calls you, you can attach the existing location and its history to the new customer account and have all that service history available to you!

[jordan_y]

We leave everything as is and add a pinned note that the customer moved and need the new homeowner's info. We've also thrown around some ideas like changing the customer's name to "Current Homeowner", or creating a new customer called "Current Homeowner" and merging these records into that one. The last option creates more work as you will need to create a new customer when the new owner calls, and then moving the location to that customer and merging. Hope that makes sense.