Delivery exception recovery
Resolve delivery exceptions before the customer starts chasing
A shipment that deviates generates its contact volume twice: once when the consignee notices, and again when they chase. Dispatchers meanwhile reconcile tracking events, driver notes, and phone calls by hand. This blueprint watches the tracking feed rather than the phone queue — detecting the exception, telling the affected party before they ask, and routing recovery to the person who can authorise its cost.
- The team
- 3 AI worker roles escalating into 2 human decision owners.
- The process
- 6 orchestrated stages, each with a named decision owner.
- The channels
- SMS, Voice, Email, WhatsApp on one shared context.
The shift
What breaks today, and what changes
The challenge
- Exceptions are discovered when the consignee calls, by which point the recovery window has usually closed.
- Dispatchers reconcile tracking events, driver updates, and inbound calls manually, with no single view of what the customer has been told.
- Status answers vary by who picks up, because the authoritative event sits in a system the agent is not looking at.
What changes
- Exceptions are detected from the tracking feed and communicated before the first chase call arrives.
- Every status statement traces to a live tracking event rather than a dispatcher’s inference.
- Reroutes, redeliveries, and compensation reach a supervisor who can weigh the cost, with the case already assembled.
The team
Every seat has one job and a defined level of autonomy
This is what gets configured in Team Canvas: role-scoped AI workers, the humans they escalate into, and a trust level on each connection that sets what a worker may do on its own. Trust starts tight and widens on evidence.
AI workers
Shipment status worker
Explains live shipment state in language a consignee can act on.
- Owns
- Status communication
- Trust level
- Acts within policy — may only state live tracking events, never an estimate
Exception classifier
Reads the tracking feed and classifies the deviation: delay, address failure, damage, or failed attempt.
- Owns
- Exception classification
- Trust level
- Acts within policy — classifies and records, does not remediate
Recovery coordinator
Assembles the recovery options and confirms the consignee’s preference and availability.
- Owns
- Recovery case assembly
- Trust level
- Acts with approval — no action with a cost attached proceeds alone
Human decision owners
Dispatch supervisor
Authorises reroutes, redeliveries, and compensation, and owns priority calls when capacity is short.
Owns: Cost and priority authority
Freight specialist
Takes regulated, damaged, and temperature-sensitive consignments where the handling rules are specific.
Owns: Regulated and damaged freight
The process
The conversation starts the work. The workflow finishes it.
Each stage records the decision that was made and the role accountable for it — which is what makes the run reviewable afterwards rather than a black box. Where the platform executes a stage rather than a person or agent performing it, that is named too, and accountability still sits with the role.
- 1
Detect
Has this shipment deviated, and into which exception class?
Exception classifier
- 2
Assess impact
What is at risk — an SLA, perishable goods, or a priority consignee?
Exception classifier
- 3
Notify first
Is there enough confirmed detail to tell the affected party before they chase?
Shipment status worker
- 4
Assemble recovery
Reroute, redeliver, hold for collection, or investigate — and what does it cost?
Recovery coordinator
- 5
Authorise
Is this action within threshold, and is it the right call given remaining capacity?
Dispatch supervisor
- 6
Confirm and close
Are the consignee, the shipper, and the tracking record all consistent?
Recovery coordinator
Run by workflow
Decision rules
The non-negotiables encoded in the workflow, not left to a prompt.
- Live tracking events are the only permitted source for a status claim; no worker infers or estimates a delivery time.
- Reroutes, redeliveries, and compensation require supervisor authorisation before they are offered.
- Regulated, damaged, and temperature-sensitive freight routes to a specialist rather than a standard recovery path.
- Priority and SLA-bound consignments are escalated automatically from the shipment record, not on request.
Controls & guardrails
What makes this safe to run in production, and provable afterwards.
- Tracking events as the single source of truth for every status statement.
- Approval thresholds on all recovery actions with a cost attached.
- Automatic priority handling for SLA-bound and temperature-sensitive freight.
- Complete exception history covering what was communicated, to whom, and when.
Platform capabilities
What this blueprint runs on
Nothing here is bespoke. Each blueprint is a configuration of the same platform, which is why the second one you launch reuses the governance you already reviewed.
Channels
- SMS
- Voice
Systems it reads and writes
- Transport management system
- Carrier tracking and EDI feeds
- Warehouse management
- CRM or shipper portal
Measurement
What we instrument from day one
These are the measurements the pilot puts in place, not benchmark results. You set the targets against your own baseline — and the same instrumentation is what decides whether a worker's trust level widens.
- Proactive share
- Measures how many exceptions were communicated outbound before an inbound contact, which is the metric this blueprint exists to move.
- Chase-call volume
- Counts inbound contacts generated per exception, so proactive notification can be shown to reduce load rather than add a channel.
- Recovery cost per exception
- Tracks what reroutes, redeliveries, and goodwill actually cost by exception type, which is what tells you where the approval thresholds belong.
Told before they asked
Inbound per exception
Approved actions
Rollout
How this one goes live
A deliberately narrow start, supervised, with autonomy widened per role once the record supports it.
Weeks 1–2
Inbound status on one lane, read-only
Answer "where is my shipment" from live tracking for a single lane or service level. Nothing writes, which proves the status grounding before any recovery action exists.
Weeks 3–4
Proactive exception notification
Switch on outbound notification from the tracking feed. This is the step that changes the economics, because it removes the chase call rather than answering it faster.
Week 5+
Recovery assembly with approval gates
Let the coordinator assemble recovery options and confirm consignee preference, with every costed action authorised by a supervisor. Threshold data then tells you where the limits belong.
Questions we get asked
Delivery exception recovery, in practice
- How do you avoid promising a delivery time you cannot hit?
- The workers may only state confirmed tracking events and are given no authority to estimate. When the feed does not support a time, the worker says what is actually known and what happens next, which is more useful to a consignee than a confident guess that fails. Estimates are the single most common source of a second chase call.
- Who decides whether to reroute or pay compensation?
- A dispatch supervisor, always. The recovery coordinator assembles the options, confirms the consignee’s preference and availability, and presents a costed case — but nothing with a cost attached executes without human authorisation. What changes is that the supervisor decides from a complete case rather than assembling it themselves between phone calls.
- We move regulated and temperature-controlled freight. Is that in scope?
- Detection and notification are; remediation is not. Those consignments route to a freight specialist, because the handling rules are specific and getting them wrong has consequences beyond a late delivery. The blueprint is scoped to the high-volume exception classes where recovery is repeatable.
What changes in Logistics & delivery
Status claims come only from live tracking events, and reroutes or compensation sit behind supervisor approval because each one has a cost attached.
Read the full Logistics & delivery analysisRelated blueprints
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Next step
Build this team around one measurable win.
We map your version of this process, compose the worker roles, connect your systems, and agree the escalation points with the people who own them — then run it supervised.