THE RECOVERY GRID — The Kept Promise

Without a grid, recovery is set by things that shouldn’t matter: which agent answers and how hard the customer pushes. The polite customer with a damaged order gets less than the furious one with a late order. The grid fixes that; the budget handles what it can’t foresee.

Four rules for the grid

Fix first, then remedyA reship or replacement goes out the same day, before any credit.
Scale with severity and history, not volumeA lost order gets more than a late one; a second failure more than a first. Shouting gets nothing extra.
Don’t make cheap failures prove themselvesIf a replacement costs less than the agent time spent asking for photos, skip the photos. Watch for abuse in the data.
Record every remedy against the customerSo the next failure is treated as a repeat. Chapter 12 explains why.

A starting grid

Failure	Fix	Remedy, first failure	Remedy, repeat within 12 months
Late 1 to 2 days, notified first	New date	None beyond the notice	Shipping refunded
Late 1 to 2 days, not notified	New date, apology	Shipping refunded	Credit of about 10% of the order
Late 3+ days, or past a date that mattered	Upgrade or reship if faster	Credit of about 10% of the order	Credit of about 20%, from a person
Split without warning	Say what’s coming, when	None unless late	Shipping refunded
Wrong or missing item	Ship the right item now	Credit of about 10%	Credit of about 20%
Damaged	Replace now	Credit of about 10%	Refund the item too
Lost	Replace now, before the carrier claim	Credit of about 15%	Refund the order too

These are starting points, not findings. Set them so the expected remedy per failure sits below the lost repeat contribution per failure from chapter 2. A credit toward the next order gives a reason to come back, and the Uber study found apologies worked best with a future-trip credit attached. Keep credits tied to failures, or customers learn to complain for them; The First Offer covers how discounts train customers.

The agent budget

A grid can’t foresee the gift that arrived after the birthday or the third failure in a month. For those, give each agent a monthly budget to spend without asking anyone.

Size it from the value at stake. Say an agent handles 150 failure contacts a month, each putting $3.75 of repeat contribution at risk, as in the example in chapter 2: about $560 a month. A budget of a fifth to a third of that, $110 to $190, covers the cases that matter most Derived.

A per-case limit, say twice the grid remedy, so one case can’t empty the month.
Review for patterns, not policing. Recurring uses become grid rows.
No rollover. It’s not a savings target; a team that underspends is probably under-recovering.

A written grid makes recovery fair. A budget makes it human. You need both.

Do this

Pull last month’s remedies by failure type and agent. The spread between agents is the argument for the grid.
Publish the grid and the budget to the team in one page, with the date you’ll review both.

This is one chapter of The Kept Promise, which is free and readable in full on a single page with no form in front of it.