DUNNING

Dunning is a term for the process of communicating with customers with the intent of collecting payment. Slack’s dunning process hadn’t been updated in some time, and the team wanted to try and reduce the number of customers caught in it by making it easier to understand what was going on, and easier to pay their bills as a result.

At the time, we were sending these huge, massive, complex emails to account owners, but doing very little in product. The messaging wasn’t clear, the cadence wasn’t right, and we couldn’t even guarantee these were being seen by a real person, as occasionally users would have a dedicated “billing account” that wasn't actively used.

Existing dunning process

Creating a system

This project needed to be more than just rewriting emails. We needed to map out to figure out not just what we were sending, but when, and to who. With my product design partner, we mapped out this journey and worked on a two-pronged approach for each dunning milestone. Once a workspace was in dunning, we’d send a series of emails and display an in-product banner with varied content depending on audience and timing.

Every step fits into this system of in-product banners and direct emails, which escalate in severity as the dunning process plays out.

In-product banners

Emails

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

We start very friendly — sometimes missing a payment is a total oversight, and it can be embarrassing. No need to kick people when they’re down. Later, if we still haven’t collected payment, we begin to get into loss aversion territory. By the end, we’re direct: your payment is overdue, and here’s what’s going to happen.

In the very final week, we show a banner to all users informing them of impending changes to their workspace, which can also serve as a way for users to inquire to admins what is happening, which we thought might push admins to pay the bill.

ADDING TO SLACK KIT

This banner treatment was a big hit internally — we wound up canonizing it in our design system (Slack Kit) for other teams to use. As the content lead on Slack Kit, I was responsible for making sure our component documentation was solid, which included writing language guidelines for each component.