It’s always a headache when payments decline. The time-consuming task of tracking down members for missed payments takes away precious engagement with your community. Even more upsetting is that 1 in 3 members terminate due to a decline. You shouldn’t have to worry that declined payments will lead to members walking out the door. With new rounds of mandated closures to protect against COVID-19 across the country, your members need you to stay physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy.  

The good news is that there are solutions to avoid these uncomfortable conversations and maintain positive cash flow. Learn why payments decline and how you can save time and money recovering missed payments. This way, you can recharge and connect with your community.  

Payments 

You process a lot of payments. It may surprise you that each successful online payment, while taking at most 2.6 seconds, involves at least 10 steps of communication between 6-8 different entities. So it’s not remarkable with so much back-and-forth that payments sometimes get stuck in limbo. This broad umbrella, the headache on top of your migraine, is referred to as the declined payment.  

Hard and Soft Declines 

The good news is that understanding declines can help ease your headache and address the problems at hand. The first important distinction is between a hard and soft declines. A hard decline occurs when the issuing bank (the one connected to the customer’s card) does not approve the payment processing. A soft decline means an error occurred at some other point in the 10-step communication between merchants, processors, banks, or even the website connection. Often, simply trying again on a soft decline will help the payment go through.  

Decreasing Declines

Hopefully this basic understanding of declines eases some tension. But what if you could deal with fewer of them? Choosing simple and actionable procedures for your business will help you maintain revenue and your members, even through the toughest of times. 

One action you can take to say goodbye to declined payments is to find an integrated solution that tracks down missed payments for you. Full-service billing does just that. Gains’ full-service billing will automatically recover 55% of declines, and boost revenue by $145k in the first four months.  

Get your custom payments report and see how you can prevent card declines and grow your business today.