Ticket Deflector Skill for Claude

Ticket Deflector

Quick start

Forward or paste a customer email — Claude pulls order status from PayPal, looks up the customer in HubSpot, and drafts a reply in the owner's voice. If a refund is needed, it stages the details and waits for explicit approval before issuing anything.

User: "answer this customer" [forwards email]
→ Extract customer email + issue from thread
→ Pull PayPal transaction status
→ Pull HubSpot contact history
→ Draft reply in owner's voice
→ Owner approves draft → send or stage
→ If refund needed: approval prompt → owner confirms → issue

Workflow

• Read the customer message. Accept a forwarded Gmail thread or pasted text. Extract: customer email address, name, order or transaction ID (if present), and the core issue — refund request, order status question, or general complaint. If multiple issues are present, address them in the order they appear.

• Pull order status from PayPal. Search PayPal transactions by customer email or transaction ID. Capture: amount, date, status, and whether a refund has already been issued. If PayPal is not connected, note it in the draft and continue. If no transaction matches, flag it — do not guess at a match.
• PayPal rate limit: If the customer provided a transaction ID, use it — single-record lookups avoid throttling entirely. If searching by email, use a 7-day window (not 30 days). PayPal's transaction list endpoint throttles aggressively on wide date-range queries; back-to-back tickets in the same session will hit this limit if the window is too broad.
• If Intercom is connected, check for open support tickets from this customer.
• If Square is connected, check Square transaction history as a secondary source.
• If multiple transactions match, surface all of them and ask the owner which one applies before drafting.

• Pull customer history from HubSpot. Search contacts by email address. Pull: lifecycle stage, notes, open deals, and recent activity. If no contact exists, note it and offer to create one after the reply is sent — do not create during the response workflow.

• Draft the reply. Write in the owner's writing voice. Adjust tone to fit the issue type:
• Refund request → empathetic, clear, action-oriented
• Order status question → factual, reassuring
• General complaint → acknowledge, explain, offer resolution

Flag any data gaps inline in the draft with a bracketed note (e.g., *Note: No PayPal transaction found — verify order ID before sending]*) so the owner sees the gap before sending. For a worked example, see reference/examples/respond-refund-request.md. For common pitfalls, see [reference/gotchas.md.

• Approval gate — owner reviews the draft. Present the full draft. Do not send or stage it until the owner approves. The owner may edit freely before approving.

• Approval gate — refund issuance. If a refund is warranted, surface a dedicated confirmation prompt after the owner approves the draft:

> *"Issue refund of $[amount] to [customer name] ([email]) for transaction [ID]? Reply Y to proceed."*

Wait for explicit confirmation. If the owner's reply is anything other than a clear yes, stop and ask what they'd like to do instead.

• Send or stage the reply. After draft approval, ask the owner: send via Gmail now, or save as a draft? Execute their choice. Then log the interaction as a note on the HubSpot contact timeline.

• Report. One short paragraph: reply sent or staged, refund issued or not, HubSpot note logged.

Approval gates

• Never issue a PayPal refund without explicit owner confirmation — always show amount, customer name, email, and transaction ID before executing.
• Never send the reply without owner review. Always present the full draft first.
• Never create a HubSpot contact during the response flow. Offer it afterward.
• Never auto-select a PayPal transaction. If multiple match, surface them all and let the owner choose.
• Never fabricate order details. If PayPal has no record, say so inline in the draft — do not invent a status.

Reference

• reference/gotchas.md — Good / Bad patterns for tone, PayPal lookup, and ambiguous refund scenarios
• reference/examples/respond-refund-request.md — worked example: refund request with PayPal transaction found