Handles angry customers and refund requests with a validate-own-act de-escalation sequence and a refund decision matrix that weighs refund cost against customer LTV and chargeback risk. Use when someone asks "this customer is furious, what do I say", "should I approve this refund", "how do I deny a refund without losing the customer", or a conversation is emotionally charged. Do NOT use for routine, non-charged ticket responses - use support-ticket-reply instead; for diagnosing systemic patterns behind falling satisfaction scores, use csat-root-cause.
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name: Refund and De-escalation
description: Handles angry customers and refund requests with a validate-own-act de-escalation sequence and a refund decision matrix that weighs refund cost against customer LTV and chargeback risk. Use when someone asks "this customer is furious, what do I say", "should I approve this refund", "how do I deny a refund without losing the customer", or a conversation is emotionally charged. Do NOT use for routine, non-charged ticket responses - use support-ticket-reply instead; for diagnosing systemic patterns behind falling satisfaction scores, use csat-root-cause.
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# Refund and De-escalation
An angry customer is not attacking the agent - they are in pain and looking for someone to fix it. De-escalation is not about calming the customer down; it is about giving them a reason to trust the company again. The costly mistake this prevents is the two-sided failure: refunding reflexively (training customers to escalate for money) or denying rigidly (converting a $49 refund request into a chargeback, a public review, and a lost account worth far more).
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Gather inputs
Before responding, establish:
1. The exact thing that went wrong, in the customer's words.
2. The refund amount requested versus the customer's LTV (tenure × monthly value, or total historical spend). Label an LTV estimate a guess if the data is thin.
3. Whether the failure was the company's fault, ambiguous, or the customer's misunderstanding.
4. Contact history on this issue - how many touches so far.
5. Payment method and dispute exposure: a card payment the customer can charge back changes the math (a chargeback typically costs the refund amount plus a $15-25 fee plus a hit to the dispute ratio).
### Step 2: De-escalate before deciding anything
Run the three-step sequence. Emotion must be handled before money - a refund granted to an unheard customer still churns.
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