Collect / Recover
Failed-payment instant recovery
Their payment failed overnight. Before they even notice, the agent has found the cause, prepared the fix, and opened the conversation.
What it does
A failed payment is rarely a decision to leave, but it is usually discovered as one: a frozen subscription, a stuck deposit, an order that never shipped. Most customers never write in about it; they just drift away. Failed payments drive up to 48% of subscription churn, and a well-run recovery flow reclaims up to half of what would otherwise be lost. The agent treats payment_failed as the start of a conversation it opens itself: cause already diagnosed, fix already prepared, and when the fault is on the company's side, a ticket already filed.
How it works
- 1Trigger. a
payment_failedor stuck-deposit event arrives from the payment provider or billing platform, with the decline code attached. - 2Decision. the agent diagnoses the cause (expired card, insufficient funds, gateway decline, internal fault), checks the customer's memory, billing history, and channel consent, and picks the channel by urgency. If the failure is internal, it files the dev ticket before saying a word. The quality judge gates the message before it goes out.
- 3Action. it opens the conversation already knowing the cause and the fix. For card problems it sends the customer to the payment provider's secure card-update page; card details never pass through the conversation. Any money-moving step, such as a retry or re-bill, runs under a policy class that requires the customer's explicit confirmation first.
- 4Follow-through. once the customer confirms, the retry runs through the billing platform and the agent confirms fulfillment in the same thread, writing the outcome back to billing and CRM. If the customer fixes it on their own first, the queued outreach is cancelled. A case still open after one judged follow-up escalates to a human.
Configuration
How the agent is wired for this use case.
payment_failed or stuck-deposit event from the payment provider or billing platform, with the decline code attached- Payment provider · read the decline code, send the customer to the hosted secure card-update page, run the retry through the retry API on confirmation
- Billing platform · read billing and subscription state and payment history, write the recovered outcome back
- Ticketing system · file a dev ticket when the failure is an internal fault
- CRM · write the resolution outcome back to the customer record
- Messaging channel · open the conversation on the channel picked by urgency and confirm fulfillment in the same thread
What you need
The inputs this use case runs on. Your channels stay yours; the agent supplies the judgment.
Signals
payment_failed, stuck-deposit events, decline reason codes, customer self-fix events (for cancellation)
Data
billing and subscription state, payment history, decline codes, customer memory, channel consent
Guardrails
money-moving policy class with explicit customer confirmation; secure payment hand-off only, no card data in the conversation; judge gating on every unprompted message; frequency caps; stale-outreach cancellation when the customer self-resolves
Metrics it moves
- involuntary-churndown: the failure is repaired before the subscription lapses into a cancellation
- recovered-revenueup: each repaired payment is revenue that was already earned and about to walk away
- save-rateup: opening with the cause and the fix converts far better than a generic dunning email
Related use cases
See it on your own customer journey
Bring one drop-off, one churn cliff, or one silent segment. We will show you what a proactive agent with memory and judgment does with it.
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