The challenge
A subscription box brand with 48,000 active monthly subscribers on Razorpay was losing 14% of renewals to failed card charges every month — most because of expired cards or insufficient balance. Their dunning was a single email that 4% of customers acted on. Churn was creeping up because subscribers had no way to pause when travelling or financially stretched, so they cancelled outright.
How we deployed
- Built a 5-touch dunning sequence — WhatsApp + email + SMS — staggered over 9 days post failed renewal, with one-click Razorpay UPI fallback.
- Trained a churn-prediction model on box-open rate, app login cadence, support contact frequency and sentiment.
- High-churn-risk subscribers got a proactive WhatsApp from the brand with a curated next-box preview or a discount.
- Shipped self-serve pause, resume, skip-next-box and swap-variant flows entirely on WhatsApp.
- Routed cancellation intent into a structured save flow with offers tiered by tenure and LTV.
What changed
- 67% of failed renewals recovered within the 9-day dunning window — vs 4% on the old single-email flow.
- Overall churn fell 31% across the active base in 4 months.
- Pause/resume requests handled entirely on WhatsApp — 12,400 per month, zero CX agent touch.
- Cancellation save rate rose from 8% to 27% on the new structured flow.
- LTV per subscriber climbed Rs 1,840 on cohorts touched by the churn intervention.
"Failed renewals used to feel like leakage we could not stop. Now two-thirds of them come back inside a week, and the customer thanks us for the WhatsApp reminder."
— Head of Retention · Subscription Box Brand