✨ Just Released: "What's Churn Buster's Recovery Rate?"

Churn Buster
vs Gravy Recover

You’re facing a key business decision: what’s the best way to manage failed payments?‍

As two "dunning" solutions, Churn Buster and Gravy Recover are sometimes compared with each other.

The Churn Buster difference comes from a core belief…

Air-tight automation should come before escalation to manual outreach.

You shouldn't pay a premium for recoveries that could be handled more efficiently by software, at a fraction of the cost. And you should also escalate high-value customers before they churn, so you have a chance at retaining them.

Gravy has claimed that automation only recovers 15% of failed payments, and that manual, human outreach is the only way to outperform.

Here's what the data says:

The average Churn Buster account is recovering 50.3% of failed payments.

The top performing account recovers 94.5%.

Some Churn Buster customers loop in support teams as part of their dunning process, but this particular high-performing client doesn't. That's right—94.5% recovery without any manual outreach.

You can read more about the performance of Churn Buster in our recent study: What is Churn Buster's Recovery Rate?

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Automation + Escalation beats a manual approach

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We believe that escalating to a human is a best practice. The team at Churn Buster uses Churn Buster, and we have two escalations as part of our own campaign, recovering 93% of failed payments.

It gives you a chance at retaining customers who may have a full inbox, a misspelled email address, or who have left their current role requiring you to find a new point of contact.

Automation is effective and can handle the bulk of your recovery, while only escalating customers to your team or an outsourced team like Gravy when it's looking unlikely they'll be recovered.

You could automate that escalation to your support team in Churn Buster to take place on a given day of a campaign (ie day 20 of a 30 day campaign), or based on the dollar value of your customer.

The benefit of this approach: you won't pay high fees for the low-hanging fruit—easy recoveries that would have happened without a human touchpoint.

DigitalMarketer ran a test with Gravy alongside Churn Buster–not only did Churn Buster work better, it was more cost-effective:

“The outbound team had a variable cost that was 10-15x more expensive. It turned into a no-brainer to use Churn Buster.”
—Justin Rondeau
Fmr. Head of Technology & Ops, DigitalMarketer

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Do automated emails look trustworthy?

Gravy may not like automation for obvious reasons, but Churn Buster emails are proven, trustworthy, and as personal as you'd like them to be.

They're a mix of branded and personal/plaintext: The default campaign sends multiple emails that are a mix of branded and plaintext. It's easy to choose which emails use a template and which don't.
They're personalized: Our customers incorporate personalized details like customer name, subscription details, and recent activity outlining the value they're receiving from the subscription.
They're sent from multiple senders: You choose who the senders are from one email to the next. A great approach is to send most emails from your support team, and one from customer success or even a founder as a plaintext email offering help.
Replies get routed to your support team: You choose where replies are routed for each email. Churn Buster integrates with tools like Help Scout and ZenDesk to make it easier for your team to support (and retain) customers.

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When it comes to email content, there's no aspect you can't customize. You're in full control.

Our recommendation is for emails to match your brand to promote trust. A card update can be a big ask for skeptical customers, so everything has to be presented properly.

Here's an email from our own account: