Auditing the Gaps Around Recurly's Own Dunning

Recurly's automated dunning system handles the technical aspects of failed-payment recovery effectively. When evaluating a billing stack, the focus should shift to identifying where the platform's capabilities end and the gaps begin. A gap audit examines a one-month period of failed renewals, categorizing each outcome into three groups: recovered by the platform, recovered with human intervention, and never recovered.

The human-intervention category offers the most insight. By examining twenty of these cases closely, patterns emerge showing situations where judgment, timing, or conversation successfully resolved issues beyond the platform's capabilities. The never-recovered group is also significant. Some cases are final due to closed accounts, replaced cards, or customers who have moved on.

Others are soft failures that aged out of the campaign window, had schedules misaligned with the customer's payment frequency, or received unspecific messages that failed to prompt action.

Addressing these gaps does not require replacing the billing platform. Instead, it involves adding layers of reading and responding to the existing machinery. This could include classifying declines as they occur rather than waiting for monthly reports, running outreach in parallel with retries, and adapting the response cadence based on customer behavior instead of sticking to a fixed schedule.

When conducting a gap audit, it is crucial to sample honestly by pulling the actual data as it happened, not just the cases that stand out. Separating configuration issues from coverage issues before making any purchases is also essential. Issues with campaign timing, updater connections, or notice sequences are often settings that can be easily fixed. Coverage problems, however, require a fundamentally different approach, as no platform setting alone can create a conversation or sequence a response.

Audits should be performed quarterly to account for platform updates, changes in card usage, and evolving churn patterns. Maintaining an accurate, current map of billing platform capabilities helps teams identify where their recovery efforts should focus. This approach, as advocated by Swipe Again, emphasizes auditing first to gain a deeper understanding of renewals and then layering additional reading and response mechanisms on top of the existing platform to effectively close the identified gaps.