When a customer has a problem, not a question

An enquiry and a complaint look the same when they arrive and need completely different handling. A new enquiry can wait until Monday; a customer saying the work you did last week has failed cannot. This is a Premium tool for the second kind: the problem becomes a tracked case with a deadline, and nothing depends on somebody remembering it.

Recognising a problem as a problem

The assistant distinguishes somebody reporting an issue from somebody asking a question, and opens a case instead of a sales enquiry. That matters for a reason beyond tidiness: the two go to different people, carry different urgency, and should be counted separately. A business whose enquiry inbox is half complaints cannot tell how its marketing is doing or how its service is doing.

A case can also be opened by your own team from the cabinet - most problems arrive by phone - so the tracking is not limited to what came through the chat.

A deadline counted in your hours, not in calendar hours

Every case gets a due time, and it is calculated in your own working hours and your own time zone. A problem reported at five on a Friday afternoon is not overdue on Saturday morning, because you are not open on Saturday morning; it is due early in the week, which is when your customer actually expects to hear from you. A deadline that ignores opening hours produces either false alarms or a false sense of safety, and both train people to ignore it.

When a case passes its deadline, the person it is assigned to is told. Not the whole team, and not a dashboard nobody opens - the named person who owns it.

Linking a problem to the job it is about

A problem is nearly always about something specific: a request, an order, a visit. A case can be linked to the request it concerns, so whoever picks it up sees what was promised as well as what went wrong. When your team opens a case from the cabinet, the form offers your most recent requests to link it to. One honest limitation worth knowing: the link is set when the case is opened and cannot be added afterwards, so if a customer phones about something from three weeks ago, find the request first and open the case from there.

Everything that happens to it is recorded

A case carries its own history of events - who took it, what was tried, what the customer was told, when it was resolved. That record is what makes a difficult case defensible later and what lets somebody else pick it up without a handover meeting. Private notes are part of it and are never visible to the customer and never shown to the assistant. Cases export to CSV, so a month of problems can be read as a list rather than as thirty conversations.

Photographs, which is how most problems are explained

A customer explaining a problem usually has a photograph of it. Files sent in a conversation can be attached to the case, so the evidence sits with the record rather than in a chat somebody has to scroll back through. They follow the same file rules as everywhere else: type checked from the content, malware checked, stored privately, served only to your signed-in team, on a retention schedule - so save anything that matters into your own systems too. See files customers send.

The thing the assistant will not do

It will not tell a customer their problem is resolved when the record says it is not. That is checked deterministically against the case rather than left to the model's good intentions: if a reply claims a problem has been sorted out while the case is still open, a true sentence is appended saying what will actually happen next. It is a small thing that prevents the worst failure in customer service - a promise nobody made.

It also will not promise a visit time, a refund or a remedy. Those belong to a person with the authority to decide them, which is why a case is assigned to one.

What to decide before switching it on

This is off by default for every business, and three decisions make it work: who owns cases, what your response deadline actually is in working hours, and what wording the assistant uses when somebody reports a problem. Write that wording yourself - a complaint is the conversation where tone matters most, and a cheerful chatbot reply to "your work has failed" is worse than no reply. See writing the way your chatbot should speak.

Related

Problems from existing customers are the other half of existing-customer questions, and the inbox that holds them is described in the inquiry inbox. For who in your team can see and do what, see team accounts and roles.