Some Effective Methods Beyond Dunning Management To Recover The Lost Revenue
Recovering payments is not only a bottleneck for subscription providers but for many other businesses all across the world. Think tanks mull over to devise policies so that the lost payments can be recovered from customers. It is indeed one of the difficult tasks for businesses.
But have you ever thought that what is the factor that makes recurring payments recovery so difficult? Businesses want to get payments as well as retain customers. And recovering payments side by side retaining customers is the thing that makes recovery of lost payments so difficult.
Dunning is considered the panacea to the problem of lost payment, however, there can be other tactics to recover payments when you think beyond dunning. Let us take you towards the dunning and those methods that are beyond dunning yet effective to get the lost payments.
Payment Recovery through Smart Dunning Campaign
To put it simply, dunning is to communicate with customers to get the lost payments back. When you are planning a campaign to recover the due subscription fee, the following factors would need to be considered:
- The region where the customer locates
- Payment method
- The time frame for the plan (weeks, months or years)
- Way of communication
The target of the dunning should be to convince the customer to retry to pay his subscription charges and get the payment recovered on the very first retry.
Dunning is indeed an effective method to get the lost recurring payments back in the retailer’s account. Team SubscriptionFlow has written extensively about dunning in the previous blog that you can consult. Here we are more interested in taking you beyond dunning to explore other methods of recovering your subscription fee from your customers.
Also Read: Dunning Management As An Effective Way to Recover Payments
Customer Segmentation
You segment customers and use these segmentations for various subscription business purposes. You can also segment your customers depending on the fact they are still onboard or not.
At-risk Customers
the customers who are on the verge of cancelling their subscriptions can be categorized under at-risk customers. What is the benefit of categorizing customers like this? When you know those customers who have not yet cancelled their subscriptions yet they have to pay you recurring charges, the chances of recovering money from them are higher because they have access to your system and you can get back to them comparatively easily.
Lost Customers
The customers who have cancelled their subscriptions are not easy to communicate with let alone convince them to resubscribe. To recover payments from lost customers you would need to dedicate more resources so that you can get your payments. This segmentation will make your revenue recovery campaign more targeted.
Also Read: How To Segment Your Recurring Customers & Unlock The Door To The Success
Payment Recovery Calls
Rather than dunning emails, you can try payment recovery calls. Nonetheless, some prerequisites include:
- Script for the payment recovery call
- Revisit the dunning emails if you have sent any
- Know the reason for the payment failure
- Review the customer journey with you
When you conduct calls with customers when the factors mentioned above are considered, do not just read the script to the customer. Talk to convince them that trying once again to pay their recurring charges can resolve all problems for them. You can also plan the payment recovery campaign with sales and marketing teams to come up with some perks to attract those customers who pay you late or have not paid at all.
Revisit Customer Support Chat
Today, not only the business owners but common men are equally busy. They never call customer support centres for chit chat. Most of the customers come with genuine concerns. When it comes to recovering subscription fees from your customers, you should revisit the support chat with your customers where you will find the pain points that led to the cancellation of the subscriptions.
We are already living in an age where customers want live chat support. According to experts, live chat support can resolve many issues. One of the reasons for payment failures is that the customer payment fails for the first time and subscription handling systems do not let them retry.
If that is the leading cause for payment failures in your business, then one of the best ways to identify it is to consult the customer chat history with the support representatives because when the payment fails customers surely come to the customer support. So, consulting the customer chat history with the support centre can help you in many ways to recover recurring payments.
Also Read: How To Re-Engage Your Dormant Email Subscribers & How Does It Benefit Your Subscription Business
Limit the Frequency of Dunning Emails
Though dunning is the effective method of recovering failed payments, you have to limit the frequency of dunning emails. Just think about it. When the inbox is filled with dunning emails, the customer will surely be annoyed. You will probably succeed in recovering your lost payment for once but the image of your brand will be tarnished for good.
So, you need to do two things to get the required outcomes to smart dunning. First, the dunning emails should not be too frequent. Second, track the emails that you send to get recurring charges paid.
Personalised Approach
Throughout the course of doing business with a certain customer or a subscriber, nothing can help you more than personalization. Whether these are marketing emails or dunning emails, they have to be personalized. See, recovering payments is solely asking the customer to pay you what he owes towards you, but your message, email, or call should not make the customer feel that they are nothing more than a dollar sign for you. So, go for personalized messages to recover your subscription fee from the customers. Experts emphasize personalization because you not only need to get the payments but also bring the customer back.
Also Read: Everything You Need to Know about Dunning Management for SaaS Business and how it can Reduce Churn
Payment failures are surely a bump for subscription businesses, however, there are some pragmatic tactics to deal with this issue and get the payments in your account. It is hoped that through this piece of content your mind would have become enabled to help you see the bigger picture beyond dunning. Even SubscriptionFlow experts encourage dunning for the recovery of the lost revenue, but there is no harm in looking beyond just dunning emails. SubscriptionFlow is a platform that can help you manage subscriptions as well as dunning. Onboard this platform to minimize payment failures and improve the flow of revenue in your revenue stream.
