Episode 303 - Fanning the Flames: Every Payment, Every Environment, All at Once

And here's the short version.

For subscription payments and for subscription businesses, an individual transaction success depends on a lot more than just the payment.

It depends on the offer, the price, the checkout flow, the emails and the receipts that you send, your customer support agents, the card you have on file, the route that it takes, the retry schedule, the merchant's fraud history, the bank's fraud model on that particular day, the card network rules, and of course, if there's any money in the bank account at all.

And that's just for cards.

And every one of those changes kind of on its own schedule, right? Maybe you'd launched a new annual plan.

Marketing might have added a new affiliate partner.

The billing platform that you're using just shipped a new update.

Maybe the bank is changing how it codes its decline codes.

The networks change their own thresholds for, for how they're, how they're monitoring payments.

And when those environments stop moving in lockstep, you start to see performance drifting.

Your overall approval rate can be steady, but a single bank could be performing worse or a particular digital wallet.

One subscription plan might be kind of falling apart right underneath you, and you don't even know it.

So if nobody's watching at that level, nobody notices it, and then months later, you see it in your report as churn, involuntary churn, voluntary churn.

Now, most of the subscriptions merchants that I work with today have plenty of payments technology, right? You have probably one or more payment providers.

You have a billing platform, some fraud tools.

You're using Account Updater.

You've probably turned on network tokens.

Maybe you even have a recovery vendor in there as well.

Almost none of them that I've worked with have connected all of those environments together.

The processor sees it at the transaction level.

The billing platform sees it at the invoice level.

The CRM sees it at the customer level.

The contact center see, sees a phone call.

None of it's connected.

So when performance moves overall, the, the team or the company can't say why.

And here's the short version.

For subscription payments and for subscription businesses, an individual transaction success depends on a lot more than just the payment.

It depends on the offer, the price, the checkout flow, the emails and the receipts that you send, your customer support agents, the card you have on file, the route that it takes, the retry schedule, the merchant's fraud history, the bank's fraud model on that particular day, the card network rules, and of course, if there's any money in the bank account at all.

And that's just for cards.

And every one of those changes kind of on its own schedule, right? Maybe you'd launched a new annual plan.

Marketing might have added a new affiliate partner.

The billing platform that you're using just shipped a new update.

Maybe the bank is changing how it codes its decline codes.

The networks change their own thresholds for, for how they're, how they're monitoring payments.

And when those environments stop moving in lockstep, you start to see performance drifting.

Your overall approval rate can be steady, but a single bank could be performing worse or a particular digital wallet.

One subscription plan might be kind of falling apart right underneath you, and you don't even know it.

So if nobody's watching at that level, nobody notices it, and then months later, you see it in your report as churn, involuntary churn, voluntary churn.

Now, most of the subscriptions merchants that I work with today have plenty of payments technology, right? You have probably one or more payment providers.

You have a billing platform, some fraud tools.

You're using Account Updater.

You've probably turned on network tokens.

Maybe you even have a recovery vendor in there as well.

Almost none of them that I've worked with have connected all of those environments together.

The processor sees it at the transaction level.

The billing platform sees it at the invoice level.

The CRM sees it at the customer level.

The contact center see, sees a phone call.

None of it's connected.

So when performance moves overall, the, the team or the company can't say why.