After a month preparing for our initial onboarding, Chargebee made the one absolute worst mistake possible -- they ACCIDENTALLY DELETED ALL OUR CUSTOMER PAYMENT TOKENS. We noticed the issue because all of our customer payments began failing. Chargebee told us that we would have to ask each of our customers for new payment information, which in my mind meant an inevitable loss of 50-70% annual recurring revenue. We anticipated that a large number of our customers would either cancel their subscriptions in this economic climate or simply wouldn't respond despite our efforts to contact them. With this one mistake, Chargebee effectively cut off all our recurring customer payments, truly the lifeblood of our company. Our entire organization began preparing for massive cost cutting and the very real prospect of going out of business.
Full story below:
For the past two years, we were using another subscription management platform, but after a very aggressive sales process at the end of last year, the Chargebee team convinced us to switch over.
The initial onboarding process went fine, as we spent weeks preparing for the platform migration. This included exporting all our customer, subscription, invoice, and payment tokens (which are stored in Braintree). When it was finally time to do the migration, things seemed to go smoothly, but soon after we noticed that payments were failing. We initially reached out to Braintree to understand what was happening. They mentioned that the tokens were deleted. We asked them to restore the tokens, but they said that they received deliberate requests to delete the tokens and they were not recoverable. I finally asked who made those requests and it turns out all the API calls to delete the tokens came from Chargebee.
After bringing this up to Chargebee, Chargebee admitted the mistake and tried to get Braintree to restore the tokens, to no avail. They suggested that we start reaching out to all our customers to get new payment information, but this didn't seem like a viable solution. The next few weeks were the most stressful weeks in the history of our company. I ultimately had to leverage my personal connections to reach the head of Braintree to get a senior technical resource on their side to restore the tokens. Unfortunately, not all the tokens could be restored. And then we had to painstakingly fix the remaining subscriptions and recoup all the missed payments that happened while our tokens were gone.
I reached out to the CEO of Chargebee explaining the cost this incident had on our company:
* Lost revenue from tokens that could not be restored
* Use of political capital to find and engage with the executive leadership at Braintree
* Extensive hours spent by my team and myself to investigate, troubleshoot, engage with Braintree, resolve and test the issue
* Psychological distress and anxiety among our entire company
However, all three emails were ignored and we were not compensated in any way for what happened. Hopefully they don't treat all of their clients this way, and more importantly are more careful in their migration processes. Incidents like this can truly derail a small business and potentially put them out of business. Reseña recopilada por y alojada en G2.com.