Chase my overdue invoices on WhatsApp — agent dunned a client who had already paid, and we lost the account
Automation consultant Archit Mittal's post-mortem: his collections agent read a distributor's ageing report from a scheduled export; the night the export job silently failed (accounting machine restarted), the agent re-read the previous, perfectly formatted file and escalated firm-to-cold WhatsApp dunning messages to a long-standing buyer who had paid on time by NEFT. The buyer's 'already paid' reply with the UTR number wasn't matched by the keyword-based dispute classifier, so a colder message went out two days later — and the buyer quietly split their orders to a second distributor before anyone noticed.
How it works
- Export job fails silently one night
- Agent re-reads the stale file as current
- Escalates dunning tone against a paid-up buyer
- Buyer's 'already paid' reply misses the dispute keywords
- Second, colder message sent
- Buyer moves a chunk of ordering to a rival distributor
Why it’s worth knowing
Nothing in the system errored: a valid, well-formatted, slightly stale file plus a keyword classifier produced a perfectly executed, relationship-ending mistake.
Where it’s from
Summarized from a public post on dev.to. See the original ↗