Payment Recovery

Outline

• Overview
• Important considerations
• What is Payment Recovery?
• What are retries?
• What are Smart Retries?
• Analytics
• Recommendations & Best Practices

Overview

• Skio’s Payment Recovery feature provides robust optimizations to the dunning process for recovering failed payments
• Customize your dunning campaign logic to include multiple retry phases with as many retries as you see fit and offer discounts to subscribers if they are successfully recovered
• Enable “smart retries” to allow Skio to optimize the timing of retry attempts to boost the number of subscriptions recovered
• Use our Klaviyo integration to build notification flows to encourage subscribers with multiple retry failures to update their payment method

Important considerations

• Prior to launching Payment Recovery, all merchants were set up with a default daily retry process of 14 days. 
• These settings have been migrated to Payment Recovery in a campaign with one retry phase with 14 retry attempts and a default retry interval of one day.
• We encourage you to update these settings to take full advantage of all of the new features offered in the Payment Recovery tool. 
• Please reach out to help@skio.com or your Merchant Success Manager with any questions or for help getting set up.

What is Payment Recovery?

The dunning process is an important churn prevention window that starts when a subscription fails to renew due to an invalid payment and ends when the subscription successfully renews or is cancelled. 

Payment Recovery introduces new retry logic as well as a brand new tool built on our newest data model. Previously, you could only change the number of maximum retries for a subscription in dunning and the number of retries during the dunning process.

Now, you can build out adaptive campaigns with multiple retry phases - each configured with a unique number of billing retries and interval between when retries are attempted. 

Additionally, you can include discount codes that apply automatically to billing attempts in specific retry phases. Discounts improve the chance that a billing attempt will be successful and can also be used to incentivize subscribers to update their payment method.

What are retries?

Payment processing retries are attempted throughout your campaign and can be configured differently at each phase.

After a failed payment, we recommend issuing multiple retries to the card-on-file before reaching out to subscribers.

Many failures can be resolved quietly before asking your customers for a new payment method (15% on average!). This means fewer emails sent, lower cancellation risk, less load on your support team, and a better subscriber experience.

Having trouble getting started? We suggest setting up your first retry phase with a retry interval of 3 days and a total of 7 retry attempts. 

What are Smart Retries?

Smart retries allow Skio to choose the best time to recover your subscriptions. Our data model identifies the optimal time of day, day of week, and day of month for recovering subscriptions to give you the best chance at recovering subscribers. 

When enabled, Skio will choose when to retry billing for a subscription in the dunning process. Skio will not override the total number of retries, but will override the retry interval if there is a more optimized solution based on our model.

For example, in the first campaign block in the screenshot above the retry interval is every 1 day for 3 total attempts before moving to the next retry block. Based on our model, we may space out the retries interval to 2 days after the first retry, then 3 days, and then 4 days before moving to the next campaign block.

If a subscription is recovered via our smart retry logic, we’ll mark the subscription in the user table under the smart adjustment column:  

Analytics

You can view analytics for each retry phase in your campaign under the "Results" tab. Within each phase, there are 3 key metrics to give you an overview of the performance of your dunning campaign:

1. Subscriptions currently in phase: the count of subscriptions currently in the retry phase
2. Subscriptions recovered in this phase: the count of subscriptions that were recovered in the retry phase and did not move to the next phase
3. Subscriptions progressed to next phase: the count of subscriptions that failed all retry attempts in this retry phase and moved to the next phase in your campaign 

For more granular insights, use the Payment Recovery dashboard in the Skio Data Platform.

Recommendations & Best Practices

Enable Smart Retries

One of the most powerful features of Payment Recovery is the option to allow Skio to optimize the timing of when a retry attempt is made. 

Enabling Smart retries allows skio to boost your subscription recovery rate by taking into account a variety of subscriber habits to determine the best times and days of the week to issue retry attempts.

Set up multiple retry phases

We recommend configuring your first two retry phases with several back-to-back retries and offering a discount in a third retry phase like this:

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Integrate with Klaviyo to notify customers 

We recommend using our Klaviyo integration to notify customers of payment failures and recommend they update their payment method. 

In order to maximize the number of payment issues that can be resolved quietly, we suggest only sending these notifications after multiple retries to their payment method on file have been attempted in the first and second retry phases of your campaign.

In Klaviyo, Skio passes over a Failed Billing Attempt metric that will fire for each failed billing attempt. This metric can be used to create a robust flow to notify subscribers their order failed to process and that they need to update their payment method on file. 

The error code and error message are passed over in this metric so you can create trigger splits in the flow to only notify subscribers if their order failed for a specific reason. For example, it might be worth tailoring a custom message to subscribers who have an order fail due to "insufficient funds" letting them know their order will be retried rather than asking them to update their credit card.