Customer Story
How ServiceSeeking used SMS to streamline failed payment follow-up
Overview
Challenge: Manage failed subscription payments more efficiently after email and phone-based follow-up proved time-consuming, intrusive and difficult to resolve quickly.
Solution: Use automated SMS to notify subscribers as soon as a payment fails and let them resolve the issue by updating card details, scheduling a rebill or requesting support.
Results: Lower handling costs, faster payment resolution and a better subscriber experience, with failed payment handling costs reduced by 25–30%.
“The Sinch Engage (formerly MessageMedia) solution improved our business members’ experience in making communication more accessible and in real time. Calling someone to say their payment has failed is intrusive, time-consuming, and annoying. SMS is less intrusive and a better experience. There’s less hassle and it doesn’t interrupt their day.“
ServiceSeeking.com.au is an online marketplace that helps Australians compare quotes from local service providers, from plumbers and electricians to gardeners and carpenters. For the business, speed matters on both sides of the marketplace. Customers expect fast replies after posting a job, and registered businesses need to respond quickly if they want to win the work. But one part of the operation was creating unnecessary friction: failed subscription payments. When a business user’s card expired or details changed, the ServiceSeeking team initially had to send an email and then follow up by phone, which was both time-consuming and difficult to resolve quickly.
Replacing manual payment chasing with automated SMS
The old payment follow-up process was inefficient for everyone involved. Staff had to contact businesses one by one, while busy small business owners were interrupted with calls about failed payments. According to Joint CEO Oliver Pennington, that approach was intrusive, time-consuming and annoying. ServiceSeeking needed a better way to alert subscribers immediately and give them simple options to fix the problem without forcing staff into a manual chase process.
Using Sinch Engage (formerly MessageMedia), ServiceSeeking introduced an automated SMS workflow that sent a text as soon as a payment failed. The message gave subscribers a few clear next steps, including using a different card, scheduling a rebill, or speaking to an agent. Once a business selected an option, the next action happened automatically — whether that meant updating payment details, scheduling a payment, or creating a call task in Salesforce. That made payment recovery much more immediate and far less manual.
Lower costs and faster issue resolution
The new process delivered a practical operational payoff. Automated SMS reduced failed payment handling costs by 25–30%. It also made the experience easier for subscribers, since they could deal with the issue in real time on a channel that was faster and less disruptive than a phone call. Pennington said SMS was more accessible, happened in real time, and created less hassle for business users during the workday.
Beyond the cost savings, ServiceSeeking also saw broader workflow benefits. SMS improved the speed of failed payment resolution and helped the business win back more lapsed subscribers than the previous call-only approach. SMS was also used elsewhere in the customer journey, including alerts for low-competition jobs and job acceptance notifications with short links, helping businesses respond quickly and stay engaged with opportunities on the platform.
