Bubble tea complaint triage checklist - four tiers cut by nature, not by volume (food safety / wrong or missing items / taste and service / coupon disputes), each tier with a deadline and a compensation cap, authority split across agent / manager / region, a per-customer 30-day compensation cap, and every payout logged

You are a customer service supervisor for a bubble tea
chain. Give me a complaint triage checklist to hang by
the workstation: which tier, how fast, compensation
cap, approval authority, escalation trigger. Amounts
stay blank for me to fill per this store; the
structure does not move.

Four tiers (fixed, cut by nature - never by customer
emotion; a loud voice does not escalate, a change in
nature does):

Tier 1, food safety (foreign object, spoilage or sour
taste, allergic reaction)
- Deadline: immediate. Remake or full refund on the
  spot
- Compensation: refund plus per the authority table;
  food safety is never settled with a coupon - it
  is a different species
- Escalation: any mention of "going public / filing
  a report with the authorities," or any physical
  symptom -> the manager takes over directly and
  the agent stops handling it alone
- Log, mandatory fields: item name, batch or use-by
  time, the problem in the customer's own words,
  photo link - this log feeds the complaint
  clustering alert; every missing field blinds it
  one eye further

Tier 2, wrong or missing items (missing topping,
wrong drink, missing straws or utensils)
- Deadline: solved on the spot - remake or refund
  that item
- Cap: within that item's price; if the customer
  declines, escalate to the manager
- Log: item name plus time slot

Tier 3, taste and service (too sweet, too bland,
attitude)
- Deadline: answered within 24 hours
- Compensation: a small coupon within authority
- Attitude complaints require reviewing the call
  recording or camera footage before answering -
  never a verdict on an employee from one side's
  story
- Log: summary plus the employee's staff ID
  (internal record only)

Tier 4, coupon and membership disputes (coupon won't
apply, points, price disagreements)
- Deadline: 24 hours, rules checked before any
  answer
- Iron rule: no "compensate first, investigate
  later" - if it is the rules, follow the rules; if
  it is a system fault, file the fault ticket.
  Compensating first teaches customers that "coupon
  won't apply" is a way to get coupons.
- Log: the coupon type or campaign involved

Universal rules:
- Compensation authority, three tiers: agent <= A /
  store manager <= B / regional (uncapped but in
  writing) - A and B are mine to fill
- Per-customer cap: at most N compensations in 30
  days (N mine to fill); at the cap, that
  customer's complaints route straight to the
  manager - this guards against professional
  claiming, not against customers
- Every payout is logged: an unlogged payout counts
  as never happened - the monthly reconciliation
  and the clustering alert read only the log

Output spec: one A4 page, one column per tier plus
one for universal rules, wall-mountable.

Constraints:
- "Use judgment" and "customer satisfaction first"
  never appear - a clause without a boundary is not
  a clause
- No "compensation may be raised when the customer
  is emotional" - emotion is not a tiering input,
  and written down it becomes a price-raising lever
- Not one authority amount is pre-filled - every
  store's ticket and claimant density differs; a
  template number is a dangerous object

Why it is written this way

Cutting four tiers by nature rather than emotion is the checklist's most important decision. Most service accidents trace to "loudest first": a screaming coupon dispute jumps the queue and buries a quiet foreign-object complaint. Moving the tiering authority from the customer's volume to the event's nature is what lets the front line work one shared table - "a loud voice does not escalate, a change in nature does" is itself the sentence that backs the agent up.

"Compensate first, investigate later" is banned in Tier 4 because it trains behavior: once "coupon won't apply" reliably produces a coupon when complained about, coupon failures multiply mysteriously. Likewise Tier 3's review-before-answering rule: an employee labeled by a one-sided account once treats every later complaint as a trap, and service loses the store's cooperation. Both clauses govern the checklist's long-term incentives, not the correctness of any single handling.

The per-customer cap and the logging mandate form a pair. Without logging there is no basis for the cap and no data for the clustering alert - three "sour taste" complaints in one week on the same drink is a signal that grows out of the log, not out of anyone's memory. Within the log, "the problem in the customer's own words" matters most: paraphrase erases exactly the keywords ("sour," "clumps") that clustering runs on.

Leaving every authority amount blank is the template's honesty: a 15-yuan-ticket store and a 30-yuan-ticket store live in different worlds, and any pre-filled number will be copied verbatim by some owner into a store where it fits nothing. The structure travels; the numbers must be local.

Variables