Lab C2

The Complaint Handover Desk

~5h · groups · today's capstone

Sixteen overnight complaints. One morning to triage, draft, and hand each one off safely.

C2 Monday 9am — a customer complaint just hit your inbox

The Complaint Handover Desk

You're covering the complaints desk this Monday morning.

It's Monday, 9am. Overnight, sixteen customer complaints landed — some are simple, some are urgent, and a few are the kind that escalate fast if the wrong person sits on them for an hour. Whoever's on the complaints desk needs to read all sixteen, decide what's urgent, draft a handover note for whoever picks each one up, and — for the ones that need it — a first response the customer will actually read before anything official happens.

You already have the raw material: a fictional export of this morning's inbox, built to look and feel like the real thing — different products, different channels, different tempers. Nobody wants to write sixteen handover notes by hand every Monday, and nobody wants an agent quietly mishandling the one complaint that actually needed a human.

By the end of today, your desk should have: a triage of the sub-tasks buried inside "handle the complaints," a safety pass on what stays out of any prompt even when the data is fictional, a small reusable prompt library, a working agent that processes the batch, a validation pass that catches at least one thing the agent got wrong, and an honest answer to "what would it take before this touches a real Burgan inbox."

Team name ⬇ Download dataset — 16 fictional complaints, inbox-export style — customer, channel, subject, and what actually happened

Time budget (guide, not a clock): Triage 25m · Safety pass 20m · Prompt library 30m · Agent design 30m · Wave 2 (lunch) 40m · Validation log 40m · Agent Card 20m · Present 45m — roughly 4.2h of real work, including the Wave 2 curveball that lands at lunch. The model answers in seconds — almost none of this time is spent waiting on AI. It's spent deciding, checking, and building.

👥 How to split this: Work this as a full group. The judgment calls are the point — don't split it up and merge answers, argue them out together.

Triage this scenario's work

For each task below, pick the task shape and the risk level, then write the reusable reason — the part your future self (or a teammate covering this desk) actually re-reads.

Task	Shape	Risk	Why (one line)
Categorize each complaint by urgency — urgent / standard / follow-up Reasoning task: you’re judging, not just sorting.
Draft a 3-line handover note per complaint for the next shift Summarize.
Draft a first-response acknowledgment for the complaints that need one today Draft.
Extract the specific ask (refund, fix, explanation, document) from each complaint body Extract.
Decide which complaints go to immediate escalation vs. the standard queue Reason.
Summarize the morning’s complaint volume by product for the team lead Summarize.
Draft an apology + next-step message for a billing-related complaint Draft.
Extract each customer’s channel/contact preference for the follow-up Extract.
Reason about whether a repeated issue across complaints signals a systemic problem worth flagging upward Reason — this one needs you to look across rows, not just at one.
Draft a closing "thank you for your patience" message once a complaint is resolved Draft.