How do I set up a Payment Failure Guide in Recurly Engage?

The Payment Failure Guide in Recurly Engage is a feature that helps you reduce involuntary churn by creating a multi-step customer journey to encourage users to update their payment information, which can help recover failed charges and retain subscribers.

Key Benefits

• Increased Recovery: Directs users to the payment update page, increasing the chance of recovering failed charges.
• Customer-Friendly: Uses targeted prompts as a more user-friendly and effective way to remind customers of a failed payment compared to silent retries.
• Actionable Insights: Allows you to test different designs and messages to find the most effective way to prompt payment updates.

Prerequisites

To configure a Payment Failure Guide in Recurly Engage, you must have one of the following permissions:

• Company
• App Administrator
• App Member

Configuration Steps in Recurly Engage

1. Log in to Recurly Engage: Access the Management console, which is the central interface for configuring guides and other features.
2. Enable Sync Events: If available for your billing platform, check that the Sync events option is enabled under Settings > Actions. This ensures dunning updates are synced with your Recurly Engage segments.
3. Create the Payment Failure Guide:
   • Navigate to Guides in the main navigation.
   • Select the pre-configured Payment Failure Guide. (If Recurly Engage is connected to Recurly, the Failed Payment segment is created automatically).
4. Edit Guide Data: On the Guide's dashboard, customize data such as Segments, Limits, Status, Schedule, and Daypart settings.
5. Set Up Your Prompt: Select an Item, or Prompt, from the Guide to begin customization.
6. Add Your Trigger: In the Details section, edit the trigger. This defines where on your website the prompt will appear.
   • Recommendation: Show the prompt on all pages except the Billing Information page.
   • Note: You must configure a Trigger for each prompt in the Guide.
7. Set Your Actions: In the Actions section, configure the action to trigger customized flows, such as redirecting users to the billing information page.
8. Edit Your Design:
   • Click “Edit prompt design” from the Details screen.
   • Customize the title, message, size, and styling of the prompt.
   • Configure the prompt for both Desktop & Mobile.
   • Optionally: Adjust prompt visibility settings in the User Interaction section to display the prompt again after specific button clicks within your guide.
9. Repeat for Additional Prompts: Repeat steps 5-8 for any additional prompts that are part of the multi-step Guide. Be sure to include criteria for when the guide should continue or exit.
   • Note: For involuntary churn scenarios, a custom goal—like the user updating their payment method—is the key metric to track for a conversion event.

Testing and Launch

• Live Preview: Click "Live Preview" to see how the prompt design will appear on your website (this does not test the actual flows).
• Test the Flows:
  1. Add your own user ID to the Test Users segment under Settings > Users > Test Users.
  2. In the guide, set the Test Users as the segment so only test users will see the prompt.
  3. You can reset user clicks under Settings > Users > Test Users > Reset Clicks to relaunch the guide during testing.
• Launch: Once testing is complete, update your segments to target live users and set your Guide Live in the Status section.