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The Postal Service will continue efforts to serve customers at Post Offices in 5 minutes or less. This will be accomplished through more efficient staffing and scheduling, enabled by detailed data on transactions volumes and customer traffic. Incremental improvement targets will be established to improve performance to assure that by 2010 customers are served within the 5 minute standard.

Extended evening and/or Saturday hours are being offered at select Post Offices where customers support extended service with adequate revenue. The goal is to align service with customer needs without increasing total cost. This will be done by adjusting staffing to more closely match customer traffic.

Promote New Technologies that Improve Change-of-Address

Each year, 45 million change-of-address (COA) requests are submitted, roughly equivalent to the combined populations of New York, New Jersey, and all of New England. The Postal Service has recently introduced several improvements to make the process more convenient and efficient. It simplified the COA form, allowing customers to provide more complete and accurate information about their old and new addresses. With a strategic partner, the Postal Service reduced the cost to produce and distribute COA forms and notification letters, and continued to add new value for customers, including the introduction of Internet and telephone COA. These processes provide more accurate changes because customer-supplied address information is validated against address databases at the same time the request is submitted. The Postal Service's goal is to increase the annual number of COAs submitted online from almost 5 million today to over 20 million in 2010.

There are a number of other efforts underway to improve the convenience of changing addresses. This year the Postal Service will test email notification to customers that mail forwarding has begun, as well as follow-up reminders when forwarding is about to expire. It will also improve the availability of information about changing addresses and develop a secure automated process for customers to correct, modify, or cancel a COA submission if necessary.