Subscription customers are a core part of subspace's business. They have a committed relationship with subspace and pay for regular delivery of products or services. This creates a very different experience and a greater perceived value from the infrequent, single purchase transactional relationships other business types have with their customers. For this reason, subspace must be customer-obsessed – the success of their customer relationships depends on it.

Unfortunately, many subscription companies don’t understand that the payment experience is a critical part of the customer relationship and a key driver of satisfaction and retention. Subscribers expect great overall experiences and they expect their card payments to work the first time. This means that how subspace recovers failed payments is extremely important. Their goal should be to resolve the payment without any customer involvement when possible and to create a positive experience when customer engagement is unavoidable.

The ideal payment experience for subspace customers is completely seamless. Customers make their payment and receive the products and services from their subscription without any interruptions.

However, a poor subspace payment experience is created when card payment requests are declined. Not surprisingly, card decline events often lead directly to customer churn. Unfortunately, the payments system itself often creates friction in the subspace subscription payments process, usually through no fault of the customer or the business. This friction takes the form of failed payments, which are decline decisions on customer cards. Decline decisions can occur in any billing period of the relationship, whether it's the first payment or the twelfth.

Decline decisions often happen because banks score recurring subscription payments as a risky transaction with an increased chance of fraud. False declines occur when banks score transactions from legitimate cards and customers as fraudulent, which occurs as high as 24% of the time for recurring payment submissions.

Subspace's goal is to resolve all failed payments without any customer involvement when possible. However, when customer engagement is unavoidable, subspace strives to create a positive experience.

The legacy subscription payments stack that most companies use today is not able to recover failed payments or avoid the poor customer experiences and lost customers that these failed payments cause. Some more sophisticated companies have created their own internal retry systems or customer collection processes to deal with failed payments, but these solutions are often ineffective and fail to deliver a great customer experience.

Subspace is a new type of subscription payments platform that is designed to solve the problem of failed payments. Subspace uses a modern payments tech stack that expands upon the legacy architecture of the billing/CRM system and payments gateway.

Subspace is able to recover failed payments and avoid poor customer experiences by:

By solving the problem of failed payments, Subspace can help companies reduce churn and increase customer satisfaction.

Subspace believes that payment recovery should be an opportunity to build a stronger customer relationship and develop deeper trust. By following the best practices above, subspace can help companies reduce churn and increase customer satisfaction.