Finance & Billing
Definition
Dunning is the systematic process of communicating with customers to recover failed payments or past-due balances. Dunning campaigns typically include automated retry logic for card payments, escalating email reminders, in-app notifications, and eventual collections handoff. Effective dunning can recover 20-30% of at-risk revenue.
Key points
- Smart retry: attempt failed card charges 3-5 times over 2 weeks
- Email cadence: reminder → urgent → final → collections
- Recoverable vs unrecoverable churn: dunning reduces recoverable
- Best dunning combines friendly and firm tone
Example
Customer's credit card expires; monthly subscription charge fails. Dunning workflow: auto-retry at day 3, email reminder at day 4, SMS at day 7, final warning at day 14, cancellation at day 21.
Stop stitching tools to track this
CRM, communications and operations share one database here, so the numbers this term describes are a dashboard rather than a spreadsheet.