Inbox and shipment monitor
Diagram of the Inbox and shipment monitor system: 6 steps
Steps
- Customer email: A customer writes in asking about an order.
- Reads the request: The message is read and sorted: tracking question, refund, or something else.
- Looks up the order: The order and its shipping status are looked up in the shop.
- Sure of the answer?: Only a clear tracking question goes on without a person.
- Replies with tracking: The customer gets the tracking link in a reply from the shared inbox.
- Hands to a person: Anything unclear is handed to a person with the draft attached.
Order-status emails answered from the shop; refunds always go to a person
The problem
A shop's inbox fills with the same question in a hundred wordings: where is my order? Each answer means opening the shop backend, finding the order, copying the tracking link and writing three lines. It takes 5 minutes and it happens 30 times a day in a busy week, which is a person's afternoon spent on questions the shop already knows the answer to. Meanwhile the emails that need judgement, a damaged parcel, a refund request, an angry customer, wait in the same queue. We built a support agent at a software company that handled roughly 9 in 10 tickets without a person; this demo shows the same pattern on a shop inbox.
The system
Every new email in Gmail goes to Claude, which reads it and decides what it is: an order-status question, a return, a complaint, or something else. For status questions it takes the order number from the email or looks up the sender's latest order in Shopify, reads the fulfilment status and the tracking link, and drafts a reply in the customer's language. Before sending, it grades its own confidence: does the order clearly belong to this sender, is there exactly one recent order, is the status unambiguous? If yes, the reply goes out and the thread is labelled. If not, or if the email is a return, a refund or a complaint, the draft and the order are posted to Slack for a person, who sends, edits or takes over.
What it does now
In the demo, status questions with a clear match are answered within a minute of arriving, with the actual tracking link, and a person only sees them in a daily summary. Returns, refunds and complaints reach a person every time, with the order already looked up. The rule set is small on purpose: the agent may answer one kind of question and may never promise money.
Where AI checks and where it decides
| Step | Who decides |
|---|---|
| Whether an email is a clear order-status question, and the reply when it is | AI decides |
| Returns, refunds, complaints, and every case the agent was not sure about | A person decides |