This article helps you understand the common reasons for customer payment failures and declined transactions. It provides a clear, step-by-step process to guide your customers toward resolving these issues, ultimately reducing your support inquiries.
Why payments fail: common causes of declined transactions
First, it's helpful to know why a payment might be declined. These are the most frequent reasons:
| Cause | Description |
| Insufficient Funds | The customer's account does not have enough money to complete the transaction. |
| Expired or Invalid Card Details | The credit/debit card used for the payment has expired, or the entered card number, CVV, or billing address is incorrect. |
| Bank/Issuer Blocks | The card-issuing bank has declined the transaction due to suspected fraud, international transaction restrictions, or pre-set spending limits. |
| 3D Secure / Authentication Failure | The customer failed to complete an extra security step required by their bank, such as 3D Secure (failure to complete the challenge will result in a decline). |
How to guide your customers to a solution
When a customer contacts you about a failed payment, you can advise them to take the following steps to resolve the issue themselves:
- Verify Payment Details: Encourage the customer to double-check that their card number, expiry date, CVV/CVC, and billing address are all entered correctly.
- Check with Their Bank: Advise them to contact their bank or card issuer to inquire about the decline. The bank can provide specific reasons for the decline (e.g., a fraud alert, insufficient funds, or an international transaction block) and can clear the transaction.
- Add Funds to Their Account: Inform the customer that their renewal failed due to lack of funds in their bank account hence suggesting them to send money to their account.
- Try a Different Payment Method: If possible, suggest they try the purchase again using an alternative credit/debit card or another available payment method.
- Retry the Transaction: Once potential issues (like incorrect details or bank blocks) have been addressed, they can retry the transaction through their account.
Please note that Cleeng's Core allows you to implement and monitor automated emails to customers regarding their payment failures.
Guiding customers to your Support Team
If a customer has tried the above steps and their payment still fails, guide them on when and how they can contact your customer support. If Cleeng’s Hi5 is part of your license, customers will need to reach out to the Hi5 team.
In the guidance, include details of what information they need to provide (see the next section). The information listed there is required for troubleshooting, regardless of who handles customer support: whether it is your own team or you use the Hi5 service.
What information should I collect for troubleshooting?
The following checklist outlines the essential information required to investigate any payment failure. Ensuring these details are collected is vital for a fast and effective investigation, whether the issue is handled by your team, the Hi5 service, or escalated further to Cleeng.
- Customer's email address: The email linked to their Cleeng account.
- Date and time of attempted transaction: Approximate timestamp of the failed payment attempt.
- Exact error message: Any specific error message displayed to the customer.
- Last 4 digits of the card used: For identification purposes. Important: never ask for full card numbers.
- Type of card: e.g., Visa, Mastercard, American Express, etc.
- Issuing country: The country where the credit/debit card was issued.
Providing this complete list of details will help to investigate and resolve the issue much more efficiently.