Warranty Return Intake & Routing

The problem this kills

A customer emails: "My unit failed, here's a photo." Now the questions start. Is it still under warranty? What's the serial, and when did they buy it? Is this defect covered, or is it wear-and-tear they'll have to pay for? Does this one go back to the vendor on an RMA, get repaired in-house, or just get replaced from stock? Who's handling it - and did anyone actually open the ticket, or is it still sitting in someone's inbox?

In most customer-service and warranty teams, this lives in a tangle of forwarded emails, a shared spreadsheet someone updates by hand, and a pile of returned units on a shelf that nobody can match back to a claim. Warranty units get lost. Customers go quiet for weeks waiting on an update. The same claim gets worked twice by two different people. And when finance or the vendor asks for the RMA number, nobody can find it.

This tool replaces the inbox chaos with a clear intake form, an automatic eligibility check, a human approval gate, and a tracked routing path - plus a clean record of every claim from "submitted" to "resolved."

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team (with a public claim form for customers), that:

• Gives customers a claim form to submit a return: product, serial number, defect description, and proof of purchase (file upload).
• Looks up the serial against your product/serial list and the warranty term to auto-check eligibility (in-warranty by date, covered defect type) - and flags anything it can't confirm for a human.
• Shows the warranty admin a review queue with the eligibility result and proof of purchase attached.
• Requires the admin to review and approve the routing - vendor RMA, in-house repair, or replace - before anything happens. The AI drafts the recommendation; a person decides.
• On approval, opens the right vendor RMA / repair ticket, captures the vendor RMA reference, and emails the customer an update automatically.
• Dedupes on serial + claim so the same unit can't be entered into two parallel return paths.
• Exports the claims and their RMA references in the exact columns your system of record expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how warranty claims reach you today, where your serial and warranty-term data lives, the real field names and formats in your product list, your typical and peak claim volumes, your exact eligibility and routing rules, your vendors' RMA processes, and your messiest edge cases (no proof of purchase, serial not found, expired-by-a-week, multi-item orders). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to your warranty process, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model.
• The full build: database, login, public claim form with file upload, the serial/warranty eligibility check, the admin review queue, the routing engine, the vendor RMA + repair + replace paths, and the customer-update emails.
• The hard human approval gate and the dedupe-on-serial-plus-claim guard.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to any vendor portal or ERP.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a warranty team actually needs:

• Login so only your team can see or touch the claims and routing.
• Row-level security so people only see the claims that belong to your organization.
• A complete audit trail - every submission, eligibility check, review, approval, RMA reference, and customer update is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI checks eligibility and recommends a route, but a real warranty admin must approve before any RMA or repair ticket is opened; nothing is auto-routed.
• Duplicate guards - dedupe on serial + claim so the same unit can't be processed into two return paths at once.

Who it's for

Customer-service reps, warranty administrators, returns/reverse-logistics coordinators, and ops/BPM folks whose warranty returns keep getting lost between the inbox, the spreadsheet, and the shelf - and who want a real, auditable intake-and-routing tool without hiring a developer or buying a heavyweight returns platform. You don't need to write code. You need your product/serial list, your vendor RMA contacts, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.