The business challenge
A growing online retailer receives recurring questions about orders, delivery, and returns. Support staff move between the storefront, order system, and policy documents to answer each message. Exceptions need judgment, but arrive in the same queue as routine requests.
The proposed approach
Start with order-status and return-policy questions. The proposed agent retrieves the customer’s verified order context, checks the current policy, and prepares an answer. Requests involving unusual conditions or discretionary refunds move to a support specialist.
What the scope would include
- A limited set of supported intents and approved policy documents.
- Authenticated order lookup with customer verification.
- Response drafting with source context available to the support team.
- A review queue for exceptions and actions requiring authorization.
How the pieces connect
The customer interface connects to an orchestration service. That service can retrieve approved knowledge and call narrowly scoped order APIs. Refund execution remains behind an explicit approval step, and every tool result is checked before the next action.
Controls and exception handling
The design includes rate limits, redacted operational logs, prompt-injection testing, and a fallback when order data or policy evidence is missing. The agent does not treat a customer’s message as authority to change a business rule.
Intended benefits
- Reduce repeated information gathering for common enquiries.
- Give customers more consistent explanations of approved policies.
- Preserve context when a person takes over an exception.
How we would evaluate it
Evaluate correct resolution on representative questions, inappropriate action attempts, handoff quality, response latency, and support-team review time.
Actual outcomes would depend on the available systems and data, agreed scope, user adoption, and results of the pilot.