Decomposing the Problem: Customer Service AI Agent
Break down LumenPay's requirements for an AI assistant that handles customer enquiries about payments and refunds. Define the initial scope, identify the authoritative data sources for each response, and determine what information can be disclosed to customers. Identify the design constraints imposed by customer identity verification, PCI DSS requirements, and human oversight of refund decisions.
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LumenPay's support team aims to reduce repetitive payment-status enquiries, operations wants to improve refund request routing, and security requires that card details are never collected through chat. Define the assistant's scope and responsibilities before selecting its architecture. The initial version must define which customer enquiries it can handle, the verified information required for each response, and the teams responsible for unresolved requests.
What LumenPay’s first version should resolve
Assume the assistant serves authenticated merchant users, not individual cardholders. Treat the following as proposed discovery decisions, not existing system capabilities.
The CLIENT framework covers Context, Landscape, Integration points, End-to-end design, Non-happy paths, and Trade-offs. Use the CLIENT framework from Chapter 1 to define the workflow, scope, and authorisation requirements before selecting the agent architecture or its components.
Distinguish four types of customer requests:
General policy questions: Answer questions using published, approved support policies.
Merchant-specific status questions: Retrieve payment status information only after verifying the user's current authorisation to access the relevant merchant records.
Refund-request intake: Explain the refund process and route requests containing only the required information to an authorised staff member.
Financial execution: Approve or process refunds and modify payout destinations.
Limit version one to policy questions, authorised payment-status enquiries, and refund-request intake. Exclude financial execution and collection of payment card details. Payment-status assistance provides a clearly defined read-only workflow, while refund intake routes requests without transferring financial decision-making authority to the assistant.
Establish baseline metrics and target outcomes for correctly resolved eligible ...