CASE_14 E-Commerce AI Agents
Automating customer returns processing with an extraction agent, from 8 minutes to 40 seconds A mid-market UK home & garden retailer (engagement 2024) processing ~15,000 returns/month, each requiring an agent to read the customer's reason, look up order history, check return eligibility against 12 policy rules, decide refund vs. exchange, and initiate logistics. Straightforward cases took ~8 minutes. The 22-agent team was at capacity with a 30% volume-growth forecast looming. Discovery & Blueprint categorised returns into 6 case types by complexity, 87% fell into the top three (straightforward enough for full automation), 13% required human judgment (fraud signals, policy exceptions, escalations). Our LangGraph extraction-and-decision agent reads the request, retrieves order context, applies the 12 policy rules deterministically (NOT via the LLM, auditable), and either completes autonomously or routes to a human with a pre-filled decision summary. 87% fully automated; processing time for those: ~40 seconds. Annual ops cost −$1.4M.