Intro
Payment failures can have a big impact on your users. Whether they are subscription businesses suffering from involuntary churn, or invoicers experiencing high levels of bad debt, payment failures are a major contributor to the problem.
Payment failures sometimes feel like an inevitability for your users, but they don’t have to be. Success+ collects 76% of payments that initially fail, allowing you to provide your users with a payment intelligence tool that will save them time and money.
Our solution
Success+ is a payment intelligence tool designed to help our joint users improve their payment success rates.
The product uses machine learning and GoCardless transactional data to retry failed payments on the day that end customers (payers) are more likely to have funds in their account. This means more successful payments, higher revenue and a reduction in customer churn and/or bad debt for our joint users.
You can learn more about the Success+ product from our partner webinar, available here.
The benefit
Adding Success+ to your partner integration has a number of benefits:
- Increase retention: Provide your existing users with a product that saves them time, improves relationships with end customers and increases revenue.
- Grow your user base: Attract new users that are looking to optimise their payment collection in an automated, intelligent way.
- Upgrade your integration: Add cutting-edge technology to your platform in a quick and straightforward way, without having to invest in much developer time and resource.
How it works
You can read an overview of how Success+ works in the Partner Guide below. You can find the relevant developer documentation here.
Success+ is an opt-in product. Individual users must first enable it within the GoCardless dashboard and specify the configuration options. Users can choose the length of the retry window (i.e. the period after payment failure that Success+ can use to retry an individual payment) and the maximum number of retries (up to a maximum of three times).
Partners can direct users to the Success+ configuration page from their partner platform using this link: https://manage.gocardless.com/success-plus
Once a user has enabled Success+, partners must complete the required technical work to ensure it can be utilised. This involves adding a ‘flag’ to payments upon creation to let GoCardless know if they should be intelligently retried using Success+ should they fail.
Partners will also need to update their UI and UX to accommodate Success+. This involves providing users with greater payment visibility (if and when a payment is being retried, how many retry attempts have taken place already etc.). Guidance on this can be found in the Success+ Partner Guide below.
FAQ
What happens when a user enables Success+ in the GoCardless dashboard but the partner hasn’t completed the necessary technical work to enable the product?
The Success+ product will only work when:
- The user has enabled the feature in the GoCardless Dashboard
- The partner has completed the relevant technical work
What technical work is involved in enabling Success+?
Partners need to add a ‘flag’ to payments upon creation to let GoCardless know if they should be intelligently retried should they fail.
Partners will also need to update their UI and UX to accommodate Success+. This involves providing users with payment visibility (if and when a payment is being retried, how many retry attempts have taken place already etc.). Guidance on this can be found in the Success+ Partner Guide below.
Can users enable and configure the Success+ product within the partner platform?
Whilst we want users to remain, and administer their GoCardless accounts within, the partner platform, this isn’t possible with Success+.
We listened to feedback from our partners during the development of the product and decided that configuration settings should remain in the GoCardless dashboard for the following reasons;
- Exposing configuration options in both the GoCardless dashboard and the partner platform risks confusing the users (we know that many users login to both the partner platform and the GoCardless dashboard)
- We may add further configuration options in the future which would require additional work from the partner and may result in a breaking change. Keeping the configuration settings in the GoCardless dashboard avoids this.
- Based on user testing we’ve found that once a user enables the feature and sets the relevant configuration options (retry window and the maximum number of retries) we do not expect them to adjust them frequently.
Note, if a user creates any payments once in the GoCardless dashboard and they have enabled the Success+ feature, these payments will be intelligently retried. We strongly recommend partners add the Success+ feature to their integrations to avoid users behaving this way.
Can partners track the number of users enabling Success+?
We don’t currently expose whether an individual user has enabled Success+ or what configuration options they have set in the partner API. This is something we are working on introducing.
In the meantime, we will record the number of users connected to a partner enabling Success+. Our aim is to share this information proactively but you can request it at any time by contacting partnerships@gocardless.com
Is Success+ available everywhere?
Success+ is currently available to users collecting payments in BACS (UK), SEPA (Eurozone), BECS (Australia), BECS NZ (New Zealand), ACH (United States), and (PAD) Canada.