Example project · Assistants for your team and your customers - A support assistant for returns and stock questions
Customer service answers the same return, lead-time, and documentation questions all day. We build an assistant that answers from approved information, collects what the desk needs, and hands anything else to a person.
Illustrative project plan. Company details describe the scenario; this page does not claim a completed customer engagement or measured results.
Crestline Safety Supply. Safety and PPE, 2,000 customers, a three-person customer service desk.
The situation
About half of inbound emails are return-policy questions, requests for safety data sheets, and stock or lead-time checks.
The answers exist in a policy document, a product-data folder, and the ERP, but a person has to look each one up.
What we would build
- A knowledge source built only from approved content: the return policy, product documents, and a stock-status export refreshed on an agreed schedule.
- A website or email assistant that answers those questions, cites the document it used, and collects order number and reason when a return is requested.
- Escalation rules: anything about product suitability, pricing, or an angry customer goes straight to the desk with the conversation attached.
- For authenticated customers, order status can be added later as a separately scoped integration.
The workflow in action
A public support question
Customer: “What do you need for a return request?” Assistant: “Please provide the invoice number, item number, quantity, and item condition. A support team member reviews eligibility before approving the return.” Source: returns policy, revision 3.
An internal support question
“Find the approved installation document for this catalog item.”
- The assistant retrieves the applicable document and shows its source and version.
- It prepares a response for the representative.
- Missing or conflicting documents are escalated.
Where the assistant stops
- Order or account details
- Authenticate the customer and verify record-level access first. Never disclose another customer’s records.
- Technical suitability
- Escalate uncertain substitutions, compatibility, and safety-critical advice to the qualified product or technical team.
- Unknown answer
- Say the answer is unavailable, collect the relevant details, and hand off to a person rather than inventing a policy.
What you would see - Week by week, what lands on your desk.
Weeks 1 to 2
The approved content list, the escalation rules, and 100 real past questions used as the test set.
Week 3
The assistant answering the test set, with your service lead grading each answer as correct, incomplete, or should-have-escalated.
Week 4
A soft launch to a small group of customers, with every conversation reviewable by the desk.
Weeks 5 to 6
General availability, a weekly quality review, and handover to the service lead as owner.
What you would have at the end
- The assistant, its content sources, and its escalation rules, documented.
- A review screen showing every conversation, what was answered, and what was escalated.
- A process for updating approved content without involving us.
What it would not do
- Answering from the open internet or from unapproved documents.
- Recommending whether a product is suitable for a customer’s use. That is escalated.
- Customer-specific order data without authentication, which is scoped separately.
How we would measure it
- Share of inbound questions resolved without a person.
- Escalations that should have been answered, and answers that should have been escalated, from the weekly review.
- Customer-service response time for the questions that still reach the desk.
Let’s start with one thing.
What would better performance look like?
Bring a result you want to improve, a symptom, or a workflow you already understand. You do not need to know the bottleneck yet. We’ll help choose what to investigate first.
No transaction files needed for the first conversation.