Worked examples
Four operational exceptions end to end: a lost parcel, an oversell, a late supplier, a damaged item.
Each of these follows one piece of work from arrival to settlement, naming which stage does what. They are the ordinary exceptions of a small commerce operation, which is what the product is shaped around.
A parcel is scanned to the wrong postcode
Intake
The customer messages the marketplace asking where the order is. It becomes a board item with the source recorded and the order reference attached, unowned, in triage.
Act
The agent whose brief covers order exceptions picks it up, reads the tracking, and finds a scan against a postcode that is not the delivery address.
Act
It drafts the customer reply and opens a claim with the courier where the connection allows it. Both are actions; whether either goes out unattended is your routing configuration.
Approve
If you routed customer replies about delivery failures to a person, the draft waits with the tracking evidence beside it. Releasing sends it; holding leaves the item owned by you.
Monitor
The trace carries the tracking read, the claim, the draft and your decision, in order, with your name on the release.
The same unit sells twice
Two channels, one physical unit, and the stock sheet updated after both sales. Watch catches this as a reconciliation rather than as a stock alert, because the quantity is not wrong on either channel individually — they disagree with each other.
- Watch compares the listing quantity against the stock sheet and raises the disagreement as an item, rather than reordering against either figure.
- The agent does not decide which customer loses. That is routed to a person with both orders and their timestamps.
- Once you decide, the correction is applied to whichever system was wrong, and the customer message goes through the same drafting and routing as any other.
A supplier is a week late
Watch
The purchase order passes its delivery date. A follow-up is scheduled rather than sent immediately, because one day late is noise.
Act
At three days the agent chases in the supplier's existing thread. At seven it chases again.
Act
The supplier replies with a new date. The agent puts it on the item and stops chasing — the brief told it to, and the stopping is the part that makes this useful rather than annoying.
Watch
Cover is recalculated against the new date. If the new date puts cover below the threshold, that is a new item, not a continuation of this one.
An item arrives damaged
The customer says it arrived broken and does not attach a photograph. The agent asks once, records the request against the item, and waits. If the photograph arrives it goes on the item as evidence; if it does not, the item ages and appears in the daily brief as waiting rather than as settled.
The refund itself is money, so it is drafted with the evidence and the current order record beside the proposed change, and it goes wherever you routed refunds. Nothing about the agent's confidence changes that routing — it is a property of the action type and your configuration, not of how sure the agent was.