Payment Exceptions & Recovery
BILL
Overview
At BILL, I led the design of a self-service payment recovery experience that helped businesses identify, understand, and resolve payment failures without relying on customer support.
BILL processed over 46 million payments annually, but when payments failed, customers often struggled to understand what went wrong, who needed to act, or how to resolve the issue. Fragmented workflows and limited guidance turned routine payment exceptions into frustrating, support-dependent experiences.
I helped transform payment recovery from a reactive support process into a more proactive, guided experience — connecting issue identification, corrective actions, and resolution within the existing payment workflow.
My role
As Senior Product Designer, I partnered with product management, engineering, payment operations, customer support, legal, and research to shape the end-to-end recovery experience.
My responsibilities included understanding payment failure scenarios, defining interaction patterns, mapping recovery workflows, aligning design decisions with operational constraints, and delivering reusable components for implementation.
I helped establish a consistent recovery model that balanced customer needs, business priorities, and the complexity of financial transactions.
Key Impact
The initiative contributed to a 23% reduction in payment-related support requests while establishing a reusable framework for self-service payment recovery.
23% — Reduction in payment-related support requests
12,000 — Monthly payment-status support contacts before the initiative, approximately
46M+ — Payments processed annually by BILL in 2024
Payment status contacts
Re-issue payment volume
The Problem
When a business payment failed, customers often lacked clear guidance on what had happened and how to resolve it. Issues such as undeliverable checks, invalid vendor banking information, insufficient funds, and debit blocks required different actions, but the product did not consistently make those next steps clear.
Payment failures created uncertainty for businesses trying to pay vendors on time. Customers were left interpreting payment statuses, navigating disconnected experiences, or contacting support to understand how to proceed.
With approximately 12,000 payment-status support contacts every month, these gaps also created recurring operational costs for BILL.
The core problem wasn't simply that payments failed. It was that customers couldn't confidently recover from those failures on their own.
Understanding the System
Payment recovery wasn't a single workflow. Each exception involved different causes, responsibilities, operational dependencies, and resolution windows.
I worked with payment operations, support, product, and engineering to understand how common failures were handled and where customers encountered friction.
We examined scenarios including undeliverable checks, invalid vendor bank accounts, insufficient funds, and bank debit blocks. Some required customers to correct information, others involved vendors, and certain failures needed intervention within specific deadlines.
Despite these differences, the same questions appeared across scenarios: What went wrong? Who needs to act? How urgent is it? What happens next?
These insights helped establish the foundations for a consistent recovery model that could accommodate different payment exceptions without forcing customers to learn an entirely new workflow each time.
Product Strategy & Prioritization
The opportunity was to shift payment recovery from reactive support intervention toward proactive, guided self-service.
Rather than designing a separate solution for each payment failure, I helped define an experience around three strategic priorities:
1. Surface actionable problems early. Make payment exceptions visible within the existing Payments Out experience so customers can identify issues before they escalate.
2. Guide users toward resolution. Translate technical payment failures into understandable explanations and contextual next steps, reducing dependence on support.
3. Build for repeatability. Establish shared recovery patterns that support different exception types while accommodating their unique business rules.
I partnered with cross-functional stakeholders to balance customer urgency, operational feasibility, and implementation scope, focusing on recovery scenarios where the product could provide meaningful guidance or direct corrective actions.
The goal wasn't simply to improve error messaging. It was to make payment recovery a more consistent capability within BILL.
Key Design Decisions
Proactive Visibility — Introduced a dedicated Needs Attention experience, supported by contextual banners and actionable payment statuses, to surface problems before customers needed to contact support.
Guided Recovery — Designed a consistent Fix Now interaction model that brought corrective actions into contextual side drawers, allowing customers to resolve issues without navigating away from their payment list.
Urgency — Established a time-sensitive prioritization model that differentiated routine exceptions from urgent and overdue issues, helping customers focus on payments requiring immediate action.
Designing the Recovery Experience
I translated the recovery strategy into an end-to-end experience embedded within BILL's Payments Out workflow.
Identify the problem
A dedicated Needs Attention view, contextual banners, and actionable statuses surfaced payments requiring customer intervention.
Understand what went wrong
Clear explanations replaced ambiguous payment failure messages, helping customers recognize the issue, its implications, and the action required.
Take corrective action
A consistent Fix Now entry point launched guided recovery experiences tailored to the exception. For undeliverable checks, customers could correct delivery information. For invalid vendor banking details, the experience guided the appropriate vendor outreach.
Review and confirm
Review states, confirmations, and feedback messages clarified what had been updated, what would happen next, and whether additional action was needed.
These patterns connected previously fragmented steps into a more predictable recovery journey while creating reusable foundations for additional exception scenarios.
Outcomes & Business Impact
The initiative contributed to a 23% reduction in payment-related support requests, helping reduce customers' reliance on support for understanding and resolving payment issues.
Beyond the measured support impact, the project established a more consistent self-service recovery experience within Payments Out.
The work created reusable interaction patterns for surfacing exceptions, communicating urgency, guiding corrective actions, and confirming resolution. These patterns provided a foundation for supporting additional failure types without designing entirely separate experiences.
The broader product value was a shift from simply communicating payment status toward enabling customers to take action when something went wrong.
Reflection & Learnings
Payment Exceptions & Recovery reinforced that solving complex enterprise problems requires more than simplifying individual screens. It requires understanding the systems, business rules, and operational dependencies behind the customer experience.
The most important design decision was to approach payment failures as a connected recovery problem rather than a collection of isolated error states.
This project strengthened my approach to product strategy and systems thinking: identify recurring customer problems, align solutions with operational realities, make deliberate scope tradeoffs, and establish reusable patterns that create value beyond a single feature.