• Introduction
• Articles We've Written
• Alexa
• The Team
• Let's Talk
• eBooks

Improving Dunning Emails & Adding Phone Call Follow-ups

We’ve always focused on giving LessAccounting.com (our SaaS product) a personal, warm touch. It wasn’t until recently that we realized the power of the telephone.

In the beginning of 2012, we had over 400 businesses in LessAccounting with invalid billing information. These are people that WANT TO PAY US, but have expired credit cards, invalid billing addresses, card numbers for cards that have closed accounts or cards with full limits. At $30 a month, that’s $12,000 plus of monthly revenue that we were unable to collect.

We’ve always sent dunnin email to users with bad billing and we tend to see little action in return. We don’t know the exact reason why, but we have some theories on the lack of action from our users.

Improving Dunning Process

In February, we hired my sister, Alicia, part-time just to call users with billing issues. We started by building a “bad billing call list” in the admin area of LessAccounting. The list contains user information plus a button: “Contacted or Resolved.” Alicia hits this action when she’s contacted them. This temporarily removes the user from the list and only puts them back if they have another failed charge attempt.

The Possible Outcomes of Alicia’s Call:

• Wrong Number
• No Answer/No voicemail
• Voicemail – If the user answers, she explains who she is and tells them how to resolve the issue. She can even enter the new credit card in for them if they like. No pressure sales, just a friendly reminder.

No matter the outcome, Alicia always follows up with an email. The body of the email stays the same, but the start of the email varies according to the call result. The beginning has a quick reference as to WHY she’s emailing them, the body contains HOW to resolve the situation, and the signature gives them a way to get in touch with us if they have questions.

Here’s the email she sends:

Hey there! It’s Alicia with LessAccounting.com and we spoke on the phone about your invalid billing information for your account. A lapse in your billing will result in a lapse of importing data into your bookkeeping.

To Change Billing Information

• Log into http://LessAccounting.com/login
• Navigate to “Account.”
• It’s linked at the top right of the screen.
• Scroll down to the billing form and replace the data with updated information, then hit save. (It might be as simple as an address change.)
• You might want to also head over to the "bank accounts” page and refresh your bank connections.

Let me know if you have questions!

Alicia Durrence

Less Accounting Billing Department

The Results

Most people don’t answer and let it go to voicemail. More issues are resolved via email than phone, but the phone is a nice kick in the pants for most users. Zero users have complained about the phone calls or emails. The vast majority are happy and appreciative of our calls and personalized emails.

The Result

Over the past few months the number of unpaid users has dropped from 400 invalid billings per month to around 240 invalid billings. That’s an extra +$5000 a month in billings (180 people x $30). Plus Alicia works about 2 hours a week. During this two hours she helps new, incoming billing issues and she’s slowly working that list down from 240 bad billing users.

Start calling your users with invalid billings today. FYI we use Grasshopper.com for our phone system and Stunning for Dunning emails.

Share this article via:

Linkedin |

Facebook |

Twitter

LessEverything, Inc. © 2018