Renewals and payment reminders handled by six daily jobs

The product sold annual advertising, so revenue came in on each customer's renewal date, and every customer had a different one. If that date passed unattended, the money did not come in at all.

Nobody could watch several thousand expiry dates by hand. The rule to downgrade a listing after non-payment also could not be left to someone's judgment, because a rule applied to some late accounts and skipped for others is worse than having no rule. It had to apply the same way to every account.

The commercial rules therefore had to be written in code and run on a schedule, without anyone deciding each day to run them.

I made renewal the central job. It found listings approaching expiry and sent reminders. When a listing was more than seven days late, the job downgraded it automatically, updated the invoice and re-indexed the record, so search showed the change immediately. Without the re-indexing, the downgrade would have existed only in the database, and the advertiser would have kept the placement they had stopped paying for.

Recurring payments had three outcomes. A successful charge, a failed charge and an upcoming charge each had their own message. I treated a failed payment as a reason to contact a customer who probably wanted to keep the service.

Re-engagement followed the annual cycle. A three-step campaign went out at roughly 179, 182 and 186 days after a listing's last update. About half a year before renewal, stale information in a listing is a sign that the owner has stopped thinking about it, and those owners are the ones who fail to renew.

I chose the channel for each job. Reminders about unfinished draft listings appeared in the app instead of arriving by email, so someone halfway through creating a listing found the reminder where they had left off.

All mail went through one sending service. Every job followed the same steps: query the database, take a template from object storage, write a record and put a message on a queue. Outside production, that service redirected all mail to a test address, so there was no way for staging to email a real customer.

• Six daily jobs that ran renewal, downgrade, dunning and re-engagement
• The same commercial rules applied to every account, without anyone having to decide to apply them
• 55 email templates, all going out through a single sending service

The jobs ran daily and reported only their errors. There was no way to see how many listings had been downgraded in a given week, or whether the re-engagement campaign changed anything at all. I would add a business-level report next to the error log that answers those two questions. Without it, a job that stopped working would only have come to light when someone asked why revenue dipped.