This issue came up recently and I was surprised because I thought we were past this. The issue is this: If you allow your members and customers to view and edit their profile online, as a rule, you should never allow them to edit their first or last name. This is a rule that should have no exceptions.

If the customer needs to change his or her name, they will have to contact the association directly and the changes can be made by staff. A minor inconvenience, but absolutely necessary.

So why not let the customer self-serve?

Because if the customer provides their login information to another person, that person could go in and change everything (e.g., first name, last name, address) and effectively "overwrite" the history of the person this record actually belonged to. (I've been around long enough to see this happen more than once at more than one organization, including one just recently!) And this is a bigger problem to solve than the minor inconvenience of the customer having to contact you directly to change that information.

So check your portal: If customers can change their names, stop allowing that!