“I'm calling from StubHub about an order” — the caller who is not your customer

The phone rings at a ticket broker at twenty to six on a Saturday. The caller is not a fan, and she is not a customer. She says: “Hi, I'm calling from StubHub about order 4471-2290. The buyer was sent the wrong seats, and the event is tonight.”

She is a support rep working a case queue. She has a buyer waiting, a script, and a field in her case notes that has to say what happens next. She is polite and she is in a hurry. The one thing she cannot do is end the call with nothing to write down.

Most answering setups give her exactly that. Voicemail gives her no next step at all. A service built for appointment businesses asks how it can help her book. And a general-purpose AI agent, asked about an order, does the most dangerous thing available: it tries to be helpful about an order it cannot see.

What the call has to produce

A rep's call is finished when two things are true. The broker's team has what it needs to open the right order, and the rep has a next step she can put in the case. The brief Harkbell's ticket broker agent runs on is built around those two, and this is what it takes down.

• Which marketplace: StubHub, Viagogo, SeatGeek, Vivid Seats, TickPick or Gametime. It decides where your team looks.
• The order number, read back to her character by character the moment it is first heard. Digits are said one at a time, and a letter is confirmed with a word: “B as in Bravo”. One wrong digit means your team opens the wrong order, and the whole call was wasted.
• Her own case or ticket number for the call, if she gives one, noted separately. It is not the order number.
• Why she is calling: the tickets have not reached the buyer, the buyer has the wrong tickets, a re-transfer, or something else.
• When the event is, its date and its time, in the caller's words. The agent never fills that in itself.
• A number to call back, only when the call needs one. A contact center rep may give a main line and an extension, or ask to be reached on the email on the case, and it writes down exactly what she gives.

It asks only for what she has not already said, one thing at a time. The rep above gave the marketplace, the order number, the problem and the day in her first two sentences, and is not asked for any of them twice. Nor is she asked which event it is, or its name: the order number tells your team that.

Two dates that are not the same date

The in-hand date is the date the broker promised the tickets would be with the buyer. It is not the event date. A rep saying an order is past its in-hand date is describing a late delivery. A rep saying the event is tonight is describing the most urgent call the line gets. The agent keeps the two apart, because they go to different places.

Who gets a person

Where the call goes is decided by a rule, and not by how worried the caller sounds.

• The event is today, or the buyer has the wrong tickets: wrong seats, wrong section, wrong event, a barcode that will not scan. That call is put through to a person now, and the caller is asked to email the details as well, so your team also has the order in writing.
• The event is within 48 hours. A person now.
• Everything else, which means tickets past their in-hand date with the event further off, a re-transfer request, or a general question. The caller is asked to email your team at the address you set, with the order number in the subject.
• Whatever the order, a caller who asks for a person is put through to one, and so is a call the agent could not make out after three tries.

“Within 48 hours” is counted in calendar days on your business's clock: today, tomorrow and the day after. A caller rarely knows the exact start time, so the rule is generous at the far end on purpose. A person glancing at a borderline order costs your team a minute. An email nobody opens before the doors costs the sale.

That sum is done by code, not by the language model that holds the conversation. Whether Saturday's show is within 48 hours of Thursday evening is exactly the kind of arithmetic a language model gets wrong while sounding certain.

When nobody is there

A call is put through only during the hours you set for your team, and only when it arrived on a phone line with a number behind it to hand it to. Outside those hours, or if nobody picks up, the agent says when your team is back and asks the caller to email the order now, with the order number in the subject.

No callback is filed in that case, and that is deliberate. What your team acts on reaches it in writing, from the caller, and not as the agent's note of what a rep spelled down a phone line. A caller who asks to be called back gets a callback in your dashboard, with the number she gave on it, extension included.

What it never says about an order

• What the order contains, which seats or section were bought, whether the tickets were sent, or anything else about its status. It cannot see your orders. What the caller tells it about the order is what goes in the notes.
• A refund, a replacement, an upgrade, compensation, a delivery time, or that the tickets will arrive. Only your team decides what happens to an order.
• A ticket price, a fee or a resale value. A caller who wants to buy or sell tickets is asked to email the team.
• Who is at fault. The rep is not an adversary, even when the marketplace is unhappy. The agent acknowledges, collects and routes.
• And it never asks for or accepts card details, account passwords, ticket barcodes or transfer links. If a caller starts reading one out, it stops them politely. Your team asks for anything it needs by email.

The first of those is the one a general-purpose agent gets wrong. Asked “were the tickets transferred?”, a model that wants to be helpful produces a helpful-sounding sentence. The rep types that sentence into the case, and now a marketplace has your word for something nobody checked.

The buyer who rings you directly

Some callers are the buyer themselves. They are treated the same way: the same details, the same routing, the same limits. The contact the call leaves behind is tagged by who rang, a marketplace's support desk or a buyer, so the two are told apart in your contact list.

What the call leaves behind

The recording, the transcript and a written summary of the call, with the order number as the caller said it. A callback, when she asked for one. And the exact question, whenever a caller asked something you had not written an answer to, so it has one next time.

Ticket resale is the one kind of business Harkbell calls its agent fully working for today, and the app says so on the form where you choose yours. Putting a call through to a person needs a phone number, which comes with the paid plans. The free plan answers on your website, which is enough to walk the routing through yourself before a marketplace ever rings it.