Introduction
This article is for all club employees who are responsible for advanced member management, especially those dealing with debtors management. All those who are monitoring payments and transactions should be interested in reading this article and analyzing the below case study.
Before you start
Starting point to this configuration should be a thorough study of article about debt collection. Additionally, please refresh your knowledge about Automation Center.
Use case
In this case, we are considering the following scenario:
- The club wants to include the debtor immediately after the debt has been created and cancel the contract on the 8th day of the process.
- The entire sequence consists of 3 stages and is 8 day long.
- Entire process has been preceded by payment reminders which are to be sent 4 days before the payment due dates.
1. Payment reminders before the payment due date
Use the Contract Payment Reminder if you want to remind members about upcoming payment due dates to ensure they are prepared and have sufficient amount of funds on their accounts.
You make the rule working for specific payment plans only and choose from several other tokens available in this rule. If you would like this to be working differently for other category of payment plans, add another rule.
Don't forget to indicate how many days before the due date you want the notification to be sent, as it is shown on the screenshot (4 days in this case).
2. Entering the debt collection process
The Trigger
To trigger the process, use a specific rule with a specific configuration. Refer to the article mentioned above and the screenshot below.
Pay attention to the tokens used.
Basically, we need to ensure that this is the 1st stage of the process, so it has to be indicated in the rule.
You might also want your upfront contract members not to be included in the process. There is no way to apply this limitation in the rule, but as the amounts they pay are usually higher than in the case of recurring payment plans, you can try using the [CURRENT_DEBT] token, as it has been done in this use case.
In this case, the club wants its member to fall into the process one day after failed payment on the scheduled due date. If this happens and all conditions are met in terms of right configuration, 24 hours after the payment has not registered, the member will end up in the process. This stage will last for three days and number of other events will take place.
The notification
Obviously, you want your members to know about what is happening. If you are going to take some actions due to their debt, it is ok to let them know. In our case, the debtors won't be able to access the club and if they stay on debt for 8 days, their contracts will have been cancelled. So, you need to send the notification.
You can also help your members to cover the debt as soon as they can. You can do it by including a payment gate link within the notification. See the example below:
Access Block
This is how you would do that:
TAGS
Another useful feature is auto tagging. You can automatically add tags to all those members who fall into debt collection process which will allow identifying them. This is what you need to do to make it work:
And the configuration below is for those who manage to pay their debt:
3. Stage 2
At this stage, not much really happens in our specific scenario. The club can wait few more days without taking any additional action, so we want to send a clear warning about the suspension of the membership in the event of lack of payment on the 8. day. See the tokens used in the event on the screenshot below:
Notification
4. Stage 3
The club will cancel debtor's contract in case the debt is not covered yet. We will trigger it the same way we do it usually.
We will also sent notification, as usually.
Contract cancellation
This is how it is done:
5. Debt Collection Exit
If member manages to cover their debt before having reached stage 3, they automatically exit the process. However, in order to grant them the access to the club, we need to have accurate automation in place.
The unwanted TAG should be also removed at this stage.
And that's it! You're done!