What s your dunning profile?
WHAT S YOUR DUNNING PROFILE? Is your user base primarily... a. B2B (working with businesses directly) b. B2C (working with personal consumers directly) c. Mixed (An even mix of business and personal consumers) Is your user base primarily... a. Outside the US and Canada b. In the US and Canada c. Mixed What payment method do your customers use? a. Invoices and Purchase Orders b. Automated credit card payments or PayPal payments c. A mix of both invoices, credit card, and PayPal Payments How sticky is your product? a. It s a mission critical business offering b. It s a product for personal enjoyment c. It has a variety of use cases How do you communicate with customers? a. Account managers, sales reps b. Self-serve c. Email, live chat, or forum support How do you manage bad debt? a. We use a collection agency and/or follow up personally on all failing invoices b. Bad debt is written off c. We don t account for bad debt Our business payment gateway is... a. Focused on fraud detection, data analytics, and professional services b. Focused on error declines, virtual consoles, and a shared account manager c. Whatever was cheapest What s Your Dunning Profile? page 2
PROFESSIONAL PROCESSING If you answered mostly A s... your Dunning Personality is Professional Processing. Working primarily with businesses, you should configure a longer dunning cycle with fewer email notifications, to allow for payments to flow through corporate procedures. Typically a 28 day dunning cycle with 3 emails is sufficient. With this user base, Recurly also recommends BCCing an account manager or sales representative on the Payment Declined emails for more personal communication and immediate action. If dunning is set to Leave a subscription active at failure, make sure additional corrective methods are in place to terminate the subscription manually when all external collection efforts have been exhausted. Because your user base is international, you may want to consider reducing your Recurly address requirements and/or relaxing your payment gateway AVS declines. Mission critical products typically integrate with Recurly webhooks to immediately suspend provisioning at a failing payment this leads to quicker revenue recovery. Listen for the failed_ payment webhook to block access and prompt a user to contact their account manager to arrange payment. Based on your monthly revenue, ticket size and business needs, be sure to explore an enterprise payment gateway, like Litle & Co. Your gateway account manager can work with you to go beyond Recurly s dunning management and offer additional tools within their service. What s Your Dunning Profile? page 3
SELF-SERVE SOLUTION If you answered mostly B s... your Dunning Personality is Self-Serve Solution Working primarily with personal consumers who may or may not depend on your product to manage daily life, you should expect higher decline rates due to generic declines or insufficient funds. Typically a 14 day dunning cycle with 34 emails is appropriate for prompt action. Because your user base is largely domestic, setting more address requirements can be an effective measure against fraud. It s important to review this setting frequently to make sure it s optimized with monthly decline rates. Self-Serve companies increase their revenue recovery when they use Recurly webhooks to prompt users for inapp actions a webhook at failing payment can trigger a banner for a user to update their billing information. Based on your growing business, be sure to explore a midtier payment gateway like the Recurly Gateway, Authorize.net, or Wirecard. These gateways remain costeffective, but will have more robust error messaging and AVS controls than a starter payment gateway What s Your Dunning Profile? page 4
DEFAULT DUNNER If you answered mostly C s... your Dunning Personality is Default Dunner Merchants who fall in this category either have a newer business or not much problem with failing payments. You can typically stick with the Recurly default dunning settings and email templates. We recommend watching your failure rates and invoices over time to see when your business is ready to move into another dunning category. Watch for customer retention, self-serve cancellations, high decline rates, and revenue exceeding approximately $20,000/month. As your operating history and average ticket size grows, be aware of opportunities to negotiate lower merchant account fees and explore other payment gateways. Want to learn more? Recurly provides enterprise-class recurring billing management for thousands of subscription-based businesses worldwide. Contact our team today to see if Recurly is the right fit for your business. +1.844.732.8759 sales@recurly.com 2014 Recurly, Inc. All Rights Reserved. recurly.com