A billing screen built for the support phone line

Support agents shouldn't need admin access to your billing system to answer "why was I charged?". Meet the Agent Console, one screen to find the caller, see the whole account, and fix it within their limits.

By Thomas Fitzgerald, Marketing · 2026-10-18

Watch a support agent take a billing call and you'll see the same dance every time. Put the caller on hold. Log in to the billing system. Search. Find the wrong account. Search again. Scroll through charges. Ask a supervisor whether they're allowed to refund it. Come back to a caller who has been waiting four minutes.

Most small subscription teams solve this by giving everyone admin access to Recurly and hoping for the best. That works until someone refunds the wrong charge, or cancels the wrong subscription, and nobody can say who did it.

The Agent Console is a different answer: one screen built for the call.

Find the caller, on every brand at once

The agent types an email, a name or an account code. The console searches every Recurly site you run at the same time:

• One match on the brand they're working opens the account straight away.
• Several matches are listed with name, email and status, so nobody opens the wrong one by guessing.
• An account on another brand shows as an "also on" banner with a one-click switch. A caller ringing about one product may have a second subscription you'd want to know about before refunding anything.
• No match says what to ask the caller next, instead of a blank screen.

The whole account, in the order calls need it

The account view puts the figures that settle most calls at the top: plan, price, status and next renewal. Below that:

• Every transaction, declines included. Each decline says why, in plain words, without expanding anything. That's the answer to "why did my payment fail?".
• The details behind a charge one click away: the card checks and the ids to quote to finance.
• Your own custom fields, so agents see what your business tracks about a customer.

Refund or cancel, within their limits

When the answer is a refund or a cancellation, the agent does it from the same screen:

1. Choose what to do: refund a charge, cancel at the end of the term, or end it now.
2. Pick a reason from your list.
3. See exactly what will happen, and what your rules say about it.
4. Confirm.

Your rules decide how much each role can refund, per refund and per day, and how old a charge can be. If the request is over the agent's limit, confirming sends it to a manager instead. It isn't refused, and it doesn't slip through. Every action is recorded: who did it, what changed, when and why.

No admin access needed

Agents never touch Recurly's admin, and never see API keys. Each person signs in with Google or an emailed link and gets exactly what their role allows. Leads and managers see more detail than a front-line agent, such as a charge's IP address; an analyst can look but never change anything.

When the AI helps too

The same agents can also ask Claude or ChatGPT about billing and Zendesk tickets, for the questions that don't fit a single screen: "has this customer contacted us before about a double charge?" or "how many tickets about double charges came in this week?". Same rules, same limits, same audit log.

What it costs

The Agent Console is part of Retrixus Business ($149 a month), which includes three console seats. More are $19 a seat each month.

Start free, or read the refunds and cancels use case.