The Monday pile
Northgate sells bikes and parts online in the US and Canada. Every Monday the support team of four opened the queue to 300 tickets, and almost a third were the same two questions: I was charged twice and where is my order?
“They're easy, and they're urgent to the customer, so they always jumped ahead of the hard ones,” says Priya Nair, who leads support. “We spent Monday morning on copy and paste.”
Two agents, one rule
The team described both jobs in a paragraph each. Capstan drafted the steps: read the ticket, find the order in Shopify, find the charges in Stripe, check the refund policy, draft the reply. The rule was simple: refunds under $50 go out after one click; anything above, or anything that doesn't match the policy, goes to a person.
Before turning them on, the team ran a Replay on the last 30 days: 186 cases. The agent matched what the team had done on 171 and did better on 11, mostly by catching duplicate charges a person had missed.
The agent does the refunds under $50 and asks me about the rest. I read a summary at nine and I'm done with billing by ten past.
Six weeks later
The queue opens with the billing tickets already answered. Every refund is one click away in the trace if someone wants to check it, and none has been reversed.
Sample story: Northgate Bikes is an invented company. Replace this file with your own customers' stories.