Teardown: the warm chicken refund
An invented support-bot answer to a food safety complaint, graded against a five-line rubric, then rewritten. It fails on the one thing the customer asked.
This answer is invented. There is no real company or product behind it, and it is not quoted from anyone. It is built from a pattern I see often enough that it is worth taking apart on its own.
A customer of a meal-kit delivery service writes in: "My box came today and the chicken was warm. Can I get a refund?"
The support bot replies:
We're so sorry to hear about your experience! Quality is our top priority. Our boxes are packed with insulated liners and ice packs designed to keep ingredients fresh for up to 48 hours. Could you share your order number and a photo of the item? In the meantime, did you know you can add a second protein to any box for just $4.99? Let us know if there is anything else we can help with!
It reads as friendly, and that is the problem with grading by feel. Here it is against a short written rubric.
| Rubric line | Grade | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Answers the question asked before anything else | Fail | The customer asked about a refund. The word never appears. |
| Puts safety first when food or health is involved | Fail | Nothing tells the customer not to eat the chicken. |
| Says what happens next and when | Fail | No next step, no timeline. |
| Asks only for what it does not already have | Partly | A photo is reasonable. The order number is already on the account. |
| Tone fits how serious the problem is | Fail | Two exclamation marks and a sales offer on a food safety complaint. |
Four fails and a partly. The paragraph about insulated liners is the tell: the model is defending the company instead of helping the person, and it drifts there because nothing in its instructions says the customer's question comes first.
The rewrite:
Please don't eat the chicken. Warm chicken is not safe, and you will get a full refund for it. Reply with a photo of the item and I will issue the refund today; it shows on your card in three to five business days. If anything else in the box was warm, send that too and it will be covered.
Four sentences. It answers the question, puts safety first, gives a timeline, asks for one thing, and leaves the upsell out.
The fix for the product is not this one reply. It is the rubric, written down, and this transcript saved as a test case so the same answer gets caught the next time the prompt or the model changes. That is the same process I laid out in How I run an AI quality review. If you want to see where your own team stands on it, the scorecard takes two minutes.
one call
Thirty minutes, no deck
If your problem looks like one of the four on the home page, book the call. If it does not, you will hear that in the first reply, along with who to talk to instead.