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When a company grows past 1000 employees (in other words, an “enterprise”-sized company), it becomes much harder to manage customer subscriptions, billing, and other essential business operations. One area often overlooked by enterprises with a subscription model is putting a process in place for failed customer payments.
Our data suggests SaaS and subscription companies are losing around 9% of recurring revenue to failed payments. At the enterprise level, that’s a huge amount of lost revenue. That’s why large SaaS and subscription businesses should view a formalized (and automated) customer communication process as a crucial aspect of their payment collections strategy.
Read on to learn more about the benefits of dunning solutions for enterprise organizations and how Baremetrics can automate your dunning process and recover hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
What is a dunning solution?
A dunning solution is an automated payment recovery tool. The name comes from the term dun, which means to persistently demand payment for debt. That’s likely why dunning processes have gotten a bad reputation over the years — but today’s dunning solutions have come a long way.
An effective dunning solution can provide a much more positive experience for customers than simply demanding payments. Through automated email campaigns, in-app notifications, and paywalls, a dunning solution helps you work with customers to resolve payment issues in a way that can even build a stronger relationship.
Why large companies should use a dunning solution
If you’re still not convinced that your enterprise should be using a dunning solution, here are five major benefits to consider.
1. Avoid recurring revenue loss
Recurring revenue loss is one of the greatest challenges for enterprises with a subscription or SaaS business model. Many enterprises focus more on increasing MRR, but small amounts of lost revenue can also compound over time and significantly limit business growth.
The reality is that failed payments only become lost revenue if you do nothing about them, yet many enterprises lack an adequate payment recovery process. This means companies are choosing to ignore unnecessary recurring revenue loss that’s hurting their subscription-based business.
Subscriptions are meant to be seamless, but it’s inevitable for payments to go wrong for some customers. That’s why it’s so important to have a way to quickly and easily resolve payment issues. By automating the dunning process, you can recover lost revenue and prevent a loss of MRR to continue growing your subscription business.
2. Reduce churn
Besides MRR, customer churn rate is one of the most important metrics for SaaS and subscription businesses. Churn occurs when a subscription is canceled, downgraded, pauses, or canceled.
While some customer churn may be the result of a poor customer experience or product issues, there are many situations where churn isn’t a deliberate choice by customers.
Tracking user churn over time can show you trends in big-picture business problems like failed credit card payments.
For example, a failed payment that goes unresolved for too long may prevent an otherwise satisfied customer’s subscription from renewing. Small issues like incorrect credit card information or an expired card can easily prevent you from collecting a recurring payment — and the customer may not even realize there was a problem. This form of involuntary churn can eat away at your enterprise if you’re not proactively resolving customer payment issues.
A dunning solution can help you reduce involuntary or passive churn through dunning emails and in-app reminders. This gives customers the opportunity to update their payment information to avoid a disruption to their subscription.
3. Engage with your customers more often and more meaningfully
It can be challenging for large businesses to effectively scale customer interactions, but this is an essential part of retaining customers. In fact, adding more customer touchpoints through automation can help you engage with customers more frequently, leading to stronger relationships over time.
An effective dunning solution can go far beyond helping your recover payments by promoting a positive customer experience. The key is sending helpful emails rather than overwhelming your customers with generic emails that they’ll just ignore. Customized dunning emails with a human touch can help you show your customers that you are willing to work with them to resolve any issues and that you value their business.
High-quality engagement with your customers can encourage more loyalty for your brand. The first post-sales interaction should not be a generic failed payment message. Instead, you should put in place a dunning process that helps proactively resolve a potential payment issue well before you reach that point. This can improve the customer experience and cultivate loyal customers that are more likely to recommend your product or service to others.
4. Free up customer service resources through automation
Customer services teams have limited resources to handle customer inquiries about product bugs, account problems, and more. That means customer service teams have little time to spend sending out dunning emails or resolving payment issues manually — things that can be more easily automated.
Instead, an automated dunning process can help resolve a large number of these payment issues, freeing up your customer service teams to provide higher-value support for other areas of the business. This can improve your enterprise’s overall customer experience because your customer service representatives will be able to focus on more complex inquiries that require human intervention to solve.
A dunning solution can also improve your customer experience because you’re creating a layer of protection that prevents subscription disruptions. This eliminates the need for customers to contact your customer support to resolve subscription issues in the first place. Any time you can avoid service interruptions you’re creating a better customer experience that can help your business retain loyal customers.
How the dunning process works with Baremetrics
Through real-time visibility into customers and revenue, Baremetrics helps enterprises make better data-driven decisions. You’ll have the insights you need to improve operations and grow your business.
Baremetrics also provides an automated dunning feature called Recover. This dunning management solution helps you ensure your customer experience is seamless— even when payment issues inevitably arise. Custom dunning email campaigns and in-app notifications will keep your customers in the loop to help prevent involuntary churn and recurring revenue loss.
You can use dozens of out-of-the-box integrations to set up an automated dunning process with popular payment processing and subscription management platforms. This makes getting started with automating your dunning process even easier. Just enable the Recover add-on in your Baremetrics dashboard.
Most importantly, Recover is also integrated with the data tracking capabilities of the Baremetrics platform. This helps you get a better understanding of why payments are failing, whether your dunning campaigns are working, and other key insights related to dunning management.
Set up Recover in 5 minutes and immediately begin recovering revenue and reducing churn. Still not convinced? We’ve found that Recover pays for itself 38x over on average.
