Goodwill / Credit Approval Workflow

The problem this kills

A customer is upset, and your agent wants to make it right - a refund, a month free, a discount code, a credit on the account. Good. But who decides how much is too much? Can this agent give away $50 on their own, or $200? Did they already hand out three credits to the same customer this week? Is finance going to find out about this $400 refund only when the budget blows up at month-end?

In most support teams "goodwill" is a judgment call made in the moment, tracked nowhere, and reconciled never. Generous agents quietly over-spend. Cautious agents under-deliver and the customer churns anyway. Managers get pinged on Slack for one-off approvals with no record of what was decided or why. And finance has no idea what discretionary spend is flowing out until it's already gone.

This tool turns goodwill from a gut call into a controlled, consistent, on-budget process - without making agents wait around for permission on the small stuff.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Lets an agent file a goodwill request: which customer, why, the gesture type (refund / account credit / discount code / free month), and the amount or value.
• Reads your authority-limit matrix - the rules that say how much each agent (or role) can grant on their own, by gesture type - and auto-approves and logs anything within limit instantly.
• Routes anything over the limit to a manager for an approve/reject decision via Resend, before the gesture is ever issued.
• Enforces per-agent and per-period caps (e.g., no more than $X per agent per week) so generosity stays on-budget even when each individual gesture is small.
• Dedupes on request ID so the same gesture can't be issued twice.
• Logs every gesture - the reason, the amount, who requested it, who approved it, and when.
• Exports the approved gestures ready to hand to your refund/billing system, plus a full decision log.

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 goodwill is requested and approved today, what your authority matrix actually looks like, your real gesture types and how their value is measured, your per-agent and per-period caps, your typical and peak request volumes, and your messiest edge cases (the same customer asking again and again, a refund bigger than the original order, a "free month" on an annual plan). 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 support process and your budget, 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, the request form, the auto-check-vs-authority engine, per-period cap tracking, the manager approval flow, and the export.
• The hard human approval gate for over-limit gestures, and the cap enforcement that can't be bypassed.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to your billing system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a support lead and finance actually need:

• Login so only your team can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only see the requests and decisions that belong to your organization.
• A complete audit trail - every request, auto-approval, manager decision, and export is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - within-limit gestures are auto-logged, but anything over the limit physically cannot be issued until a manager approves it.
• Per-agent and per-period caps enforced in code - so discretionary spend stays inside the budget, not just inside good intentions.
• Duplicate guards so the same request ID can't be processed or paid out twice.

Who it's for

Support leads, customer-service managers, and finance partners who need control over discretionary goodwill spend - and front-line agents who want to make customers happy without waiting on a manager for every small refund. If "how much can I give away?" is currently answered by a shrug, a DM, or a buried spreadsheet, this is for you. You don't need to write code. You need your authority matrix, your gesture types, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

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