Recover failed Stripe payments with Customer.io and HubSpot

Build an agent workflow that runs every time Stripe fires an invoice.payment_failed webhook, recovers the customer through Customer.io, and escalates to a human in HubSpot when the account is high value or has failed several times in a row.

Trigger: Stripe webhook on the invoice.payment_failed event.

What the agent should do on every run:

1) Read the failed invoice and customer from the webhook payload: invoice id, amount_due (cents), attempt_count, customer id, customer email, the plan or subscription name, next_payment_attempt, and hosted_invoice_url. If anything is missing, call Stripe Retrieve Invoice and Retrieve Customer to fill in the gaps.

2) Call Customer.io Identify Person on the customer's email and upsert these traits: last_payment_failed_at (current ISO timestamp), failed_invoice_id, failed_invoice_amount (in dollars), failed_plan_name, dunning_attempt (mirror Stripe's attempt_count), and next_payment_attempt_at.

3) Call Customer.io Send Transactional Email using a pre-built dunning template, choosing tone from attempt_count: first failure is a warm, gentle reminder pointing to the billing portal link with the next retry date; second failure is a firmer reminder noting Stripe is still retrying and asking them to update payment; third or later failure is a serious tone explaining the risk of service interruption. Pass the template the customer first name, plan name, amount formatted as dollars, hosted_invoice_url, and next_payment_attempt_at as message data.

4) Decide whether to also escalate to a human. Escalate if EITHER the failed amount is above a configurable threshold (default $500, i.e. 50000 cents) OR attempt_count is 3 or more. When escalating: look up the contact in HubSpot with Get Contact by email, then call HubSpot Create Task associated with that contact. The task subject should read like 'Recover failed payment from {customer name}: ${amount} on {plan}', due tomorrow, priority HIGH, with a body that summarizes attempt count, plan, the failure reason if available, and the hosted invoice URL so the CSM can act from one place. If the HubSpot lookup returns no match, log the skip and finish the run without creating a task.

Keep the workflow idempotent. If Customer.io already holds the same failed_invoice_id with this dunning_attempt and the transactional email has already been sent for it, skip the resend and only run the HubSpot escalation step if it is also new.

Integrations used: Stripe (trigger plus Retrieve Invoice, Retrieve Customer), Customer.io (Identify Person, Send Transactional Email), HubSpot (Get Contact, Create Task).

Things I want to tweak later: the dollar threshold for HubSpot escalation, the attempt_count that always triggers escalation, the transactional message template id for each tone, and the HubSpot task owner (default to the contact's existing owner).