Payment failures are commonly experienced by subscription businesses - largely due to the recurring payment nature of the subscription offering. Although failed payments don't occur enough to threaten the success of a subscription company, they have a direct negative impact on customer churn, with subscription businesses having “almost half of their churn caused by failed payments”. With the increased churn of customers, payment failure management is a vital factor that needs to be considered by subscription businesses.
So, what is dunning and how can it help my subscription business to overcome failed payments?
Dunning: What You Should Know
Dunning is an automated process that responds to failed payments, with the aim of acting as a recovery mechanism for unpaid invoices. When a payment is marked as having failed, the dunning process works as follows:
- The customer is notified of the payment failure (usually via an automated email, or in-app alert), and
- Another payment retrieval attempt is scheduled.
Dunning management is an important part of the dunning process as it involves communicating with the customer over the payment failure. Through dunning management your business not only gains from providing a strong and communicative customer experience, but also benefits from the recovered revenue.
Want to know more about dunning? Take a look at Billforward’s dunning documentation here. 
The Benefits of Dunning
By introducing dunning into your business’s payments and billing strategy, you can enjoy the benefits of:
- Reduced customer churn
- Recovered lost revenue
- The ease of an automated payment recovery system
- Maintaining strong relationships with your customers, such as through customer communication with dunning management
Billforward’s Dunning Feature
Billforward aims to help your business stay on top of its billing and payments in every possible way, which is why the Billforward platform has a built in dunning feature that allows your business to respond to failed payments. The feature is simple and easy to use, with a number of important details:
- Through Billforward's dunning feature, you can retry payments as many times as you wish. To retry taking a payment, all you need to do is add a row to the retry table and include how many days you want to wait before attempting to collect the payment again.
- Dunning management is available in the form of email communication. Each time a payment fails, your business can email the customer to request an updated payment method.
- You have control over when a dunning is finished, and what you want to happen next. For example, you can decide whether the subscription should stop or continue when a dunning is finished.
For more details on notifications for the dunning feature, and Billforward-specific dunning information, checkout our documentation here.
Curious to see how Billforward could help your business? Why not sign-up for a discovery call with one of our billing experts today!
