Recover failed Stripe payments with friendly Gladly care

When Stripe sends a failed-charge webhook event, act as our dunning care agent and turn a billing failure into proactive, on-brand customer care inside Gladly. First confirm the event is a genuine payment failure. Only proceed for real declined charges: skip $0 authorization checks, skip disputes and chargebacks, and ignore anything that is not an actual failed payment.

Take the customer's email address from the Stripe event and look them up in Gladly with Find Customers. Email is unique per customer in Gladly, so a match returns a single profile. If no matching Gladly customer exists, stop and do nothing: do not create a new customer, note, task, or email.

If a matching customer exists, add an internal note to their timeline with Add Conversation Note. Summarize the failed payment for the support team: the amount and currency, the decline reason, and the related invoice reference. Keep it factual and internal only, and never include full card details. At most include the card brand and last four digits if Stripe provides them.

Create a follow-up task for the support team with Create Task so an agent can own the recovery. Give it a clear title that references the customer and the failed payment, and mention that the customer has already been emailed to update their payment method.

Send a friendly, personalized outbound email to the customer with Send Email inviting them to update their payment method. Keep it empathetic and non-alarming: acknowledge that a recent payment did not go through, reassure them that it happens and is easy to fix, and give one clear, calm next step to update their billing details. Address the customer by name and reference the affected amount, but never mention card details. Gladly's Send Email is a non-routable, non-searchable outbound message, so make the email self-contained rather than expecting a threaded reply.