Who is the fictional business?
Kaapi & Co. sells coffee and brewing equipment online. Support questions arrive on WhatsApp and email: order status, subscription changes, grind recommendations, damaged deliveries and the occasional angry message. A team of two handles everything.
What is the agent's purpose?
To triage every incoming message, answer routine questions from live data and approved content, draft replies for the rest, and make sure nothing urgent waits in the queue.
Which systems can it use?
| System | Read | Write | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Yes | No | Order status, items, tracking only |
| Subscription app | Yes | No | Next delivery date and plan |
| Helpdesk | Yes | Yes | Tags, priority, internal notes, drafts |
| Knowledge base | Yes | No | Approved help articles and brewing guides |
Never ask for or repeat: full card numbers, UPI PINs or OTPs, passwords.
What may the agent do alone?
- Answer order status and tracking questions from Shopify
- Answer brewing, grind and product questions from approved guides
- Share the next subscription delivery date
- Tag and prioritise every ticket
- Send a holding reply ("We've received this; the team will respond by [time]") for tickets in the approval queue
What needs approval?
| Action | Approver | Target time |
|---|---|---|
| Replies to damaged or wrong-item reports (replacement or refund) | Support lead | Same working day |
| Subscription pause, skip or cancel confirmations | Support agent | Same working day |
| Replies to wholesale or café enquiries | Founder | Within 2 working days |
What are the hard stops?
- Customer asks for a person
- Anger, abuse, or a third message without resolution
- Words like "fraud", "chargeback", "consumer court", "lawyer"
- Health concerns (for example, a reaction after drinking)
- Any request about personal data (access, deletion)
- Agent unsure of intent after one clarifying question
Stop message: "Thanks for telling us. I've passed this to our team, and someone will reply personally by [time today/tomorrow]."
What does the handover include?
The full conversation, Shopify order link, tags, the reason for stopping and the agent's suggested next step (labelled as a suggestion), posted to the helpdesk with high priority and a WhatsApp alert to the support lead during working hours.
How is the stop rule reviewed?
Weekly for the first month: the support lead reviews all hard-stop handovers and a sample of autonomous replies. Any change, such as moving subscription skips to "alone", is written in the change log and approved by the founder.
What does this example show?
Most messages can be handled or drafted automatically, while every decision involving money, health, legal risk or emotion stays with a person. You can write the same document for your own workflow with our free template.
The agent drafts, routes and escalates. A person decides. Before anything is built we write down what the agent may do alone, what needs approval, and when it must stop and hand over with the full context attached.
How do you know whether the pilot worked?
We agree the success measure before building, and it should be something your team can count without a dashboard project. Typical measures include the share of enquiries logged the same day, time to first response, the number of follow-ups that actually happened, hours spent on the task per week, or the number of escalations that were correctly flagged. We count the baseline before launch (even by hand for a week) and again after a few weeks of running.
We also review the qualitative side with the people involved. Do they trust the drafts? Are handovers arriving with enough context? Are customers asking for a person more or less often? A pilot can hit its number and still need tuning, or miss it and teach you something important. Either way, the decision to keep, tune, expand or stop is yours, made on evidence. We don't publish generic success figures, because results depend on your process, volumes and team.
What should you prepare before talking to us?
You don't need a technical brief. A useful first conversation needs only a few things, and gathering them is valuable even if you never work with us:
- The process in plain words: what triggers it, who does what, and where it usually goes wrong.
- Rough volumes: how many messages, orders, tickets or invoices per week. A one-week tally is enough.
- Your tools: WhatsApp app or API, CRM, sheets, accounting or helpdesk software, including versions or plans where you know them.
- Three real examples: typical messages or cases, plus one awkward one, with personal details removed.
- What must never happen: the mistakes that would hurt most. These become the first lines of your stop rule.
- An owner: the person who will review the workflow once it runs.
Send these on WhatsApp or by email, or run the pilot scorecard first.