Telstra lets an AI agent sort refunds while customers wait for repairs

How to do it yourself

Our suggested steps. The company didn't publish theirs.

1. 1

   List the service-outage refund rules you already use (e.g. $X per day offline after 24h).

2. 2

   Build a Google Sheet of open outage cases: customer, start time, plan price, restored yes/no.

3. 3

   In n8n, run a daily schedule that sends each open case plus your rules to ChatGPT with the prompt below.

4. 4

   Have the agent write the refund amount and a customer update email into the sheet for you to approve.

5. 5

   Once restored=yes, n8n marks the case closed and sends the approved email; review totals weekly.

The instructions to give the AI

Paste this into ChatGPT (the free plan is fine), swap the [brackets] for your details, and test it on a few real examples.

This is one part of the setup. It won't connect to your phone, inbox or other apps on its own; the steps above cover that.

You calculate outage refunds for [business]. Rules:
[paste refund rules]
For each case below: 1) check eligibility against the rules, 2) calculate days affected and refund amount, showing the maths, 3) write a 60-word customer update (still down / restored + refund applied), 4) flag anything ambiguous for a human.
Cases (CSV):
[paste rows]

What you should get back: A refund table: "Case 14 — eligible, 3 days down × $4.10/day = $12.30 credit."

Written by Quickly and Good, inspired by this case.