For the entirety of my first 4 years at Adwerx, one issue we kept deferring was that site credits from a canceled campaign never expired — a customer could hold and redeem credit indefinitely. From the CFO's perspective, that open-ended liability was a standing area of financial exposure that needed to close eventually. With a seven-figure total credit balance outstanding, resolving it required a cross-departmental effort designed to cause the least possible disruption to ongoing operations.
The challenge was making a good-faith effort to notify every affected customer of the change without prompting a rush to redeem all at once — and because our ad delivery costs were real-time, we had to be deliberate about not creating a spike in operating expense. The business wanted this resolved in a reasonably timely manner, since a large, open-ended customer credit liability sitting on the balance sheet wasn't sustainable long-term.
In coordination with our Director of Product, I ran a cohort and segmentation analysis of the existing credit base to understand our risk profile if we changed the policy, including the average time between a credit being applied to an account and being redeemed across the life of the program.
That analysis pointed to a strategy that worked for both customers and the business: we created a new ‘Inactive Customer’ definition in our Terms of Use that let us retire credit for users we had high confidence would never return to the platform — grounded in the real estate industry's own attrition rate, where more than 25% of agents stop practicing within two years. That cohort received a 90-day notice period before being moved to Inactive Customer status, with credit reinstated on request if a customer reached back out to Customer Experience.
Every other customer was given 12 months from their individual notification date to use their credit, and I built the customer-facing language and campaign framework — spanning email and in-app notifications, so customers would see it regardless of whether their email was deliverable — in coordination with Product to identify and sequence customer groups. We rolled the notification out in batches over a 4-month period specifically to avoid a spike in redemptions and preserve the ability to reverse the policy if it started to hurt margins.