devopstales/customer-billing-ops

Customer Billing Ops

Use this skill for real customer operations, not generic payment API design.

The goal is to help the operator answer: who is this customer, what happened, what is the safest fix, and what follow-up should we send?

When to Use

• Customer says billing is broken, they want a refund, or they cannot cancel
• Investigating duplicate subscriptions, accidental charges, failed renewals, or churn risk
• Reviewing plan mix, active subscriptions, yearly vs monthly conversion, or team-seat confusion
• Creating or validating a billing portal flow
• Auditing support complaints that touch subscriptions, invoices, refunds, or payment methods

Preferred Tool Surface

• Use connected billing tools such as Stripe first
• Use email, GitHub, or issue trackers only as supporting evidence
• Prefer hosted billing/customer portals over custom account-management code when the platform already provides the needed controls

Guardrails

• Never expose secret keys, full card details, or unnecessary customer PII in the response
• Do not refund blindly; first classify the issue
• Distinguish among:
  • accidental duplicate purchase
  • deliberate multi-seat or team purchase
  • broken product / unmet value
  • failed or incomplete checkout
  • cancellation due to missing self-serve controls
• For annual plans, team plans, and prorated states, verify the contract shape before taking action

Workflow

1. Identify the customer cleanly

Start from the strongest identifier available:

• customer email
• Stripe customer ID
• subscription ID
• invoice ID
• GitHub username or support email if it is known to map back to billing

Return a concise identity summary:

• customer
• active subscriptions
• canceled subscriptions
• invoices
• obvious anomalies such as duplicate active subscriptions

2. Classify the issue

Put the case into one bucket before acting:

| Case | Typical action | |------|----------------| | Duplicate personal subscription | cancel extras, consider refund | | Real multi-seat/team intent | preserve seats, clarify billing model | | Failed payment / incomplete checkout | recover via portal or update payment method | | Missing self-serve controls | provide portal, cancellation path, or invoice access | | Product failure or trust break | refund, apologize, log product issue |

3. Take the safest reversible action first

Preferred order:

1. restore self-serve management
2. fix duplicate or broken billing state
3. refund only the affected charge or duplicate
4. document the reason
5. send a short customer follow-up

If the fix requires product work, separate:

• customer remediation now
• product bug / workflow gap for backlog

4. Check operator-side product gaps

If the customer pain comes from a missing operator surface, call it out explicitly. Common examples:

• no billing portal
• no usage/rate-limit visibility
• no plan/seat explanation
• no cancellation flow
• no duplicate-subscription guard

Treat those as ECC or website follow-up items, not just support incidents.

5. Produce the operator handoff

End with:

• customer state summary
• action taken
• revenue impact
• follow-up text to send
• product or backlog issue to create

Output Format

Use this structure:

CUSTOMER
- name / email
- relevant account identifiers

BILLING STATE
- active subscriptions
- invoice or renewal state
- anomalies

DECISION
- issue classification
- why this action is correct

ACTION TAKEN
- refund / cancel / portal / no-op

FOLLOW-UP
- short customer message

PRODUCT GAP
- what should be fixed in the product or website

Examples of Good Recommendations

• "The right fix is a billing portal, not a custom dashboard yet"
• "This looks like duplicate personal checkout, not a real team-seat purchase"
• "Refund one duplicate charge, keep the remaining active subscription, then convert the customer to org billing later if needed"