Regulated industries: disputes and complaints controls

Fini (usefini.com) gives financial services teams five controls for complaint and dispute intake: tags that recognize them, Rulebook flows that capture the required details, Reply Rules that limit the agent to internal notes, escalation and routing to the right team, and the AI Steps trace as a per-reply audit record. You configure each one in your workspace, and you test the whole setup with Test Suite before it reaches customers.

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Why complaints and disputes need their own setup

Most support conversations are fine to resolve end to end. Complaints and disputes are different in three ways:

• Recognition matters. A customer rarely says “I’m filing a complaint.” They write “this is the third time you’ve charged me” or “I never authorized this payment.” If your process treats those as complaints or error notices, the agent must recognize them consistently.
• The record matters. Your process usually needs specific facts captured (dates, amounts, what the customer is asking for) and a reviewable trail of what was said.
• The wrong answer is costly. A confident AI reply that promises a refund, denies liability or sets a resolution date can create an obligation your team did not intend.

The setup below addresses each one.

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1. Recognize complaints and disputes with tags

Create a Custom tag group so every conversation gets a consistent classification. Open Tag Groups, click New Group, and configure: Write the AI Instructions from your complaint policy, not from general intuition. If your policy says any expression of dissatisfaction is a complaint, say so, and give examples. Tag accuracy depends on how specific these instructions are. See Tags. The default groups add context you can use alongside it: Sentiment (Positive, Neutral, Negative), Type of Issue, and Escalation Reason, whose Policy triggers family explains escalations caused by your rules.

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2. Keep the agent from answering where it shouldn’t

Decide, per category, whether the agent may reply to the customer at all. Then encode it in Reply Rules: With the Internal Comment card, the agent posts a note your team sees in the helpdesk (an Internal Note in Zendesk and Intercom, an Internal Comment in Front, a Case Comment in Salesforce) and nothing reaches the customer. The stricter card always wins, so a broad Direct Reply setup elsewhere cannot override these.

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3. Capture what your process requires

Where your policy allows the agent to take the intake, build an Intent Rule that collects the facts deterministically instead of leaving it to free-form conversation. See Rulebook.

• Check nodes branch on the Complaint or Dispute tag and on User Attributes such as account type.
• Read nodes extract structured values from the conversation into tree variables: transaction date, amount, merchant, what the customer is asking for.
• A Form node collects typed input in the widget when you need exact values. Email channels cannot render Forms, so use Read nodes there.
• A Tool node calls an Action that creates the case in your complaints or disputes system, with the captured values and the conversation reference.
• A Reply node acknowledges receipt with the wording your compliance team approved, including the case reference your system returned.

Keep the Reply wording factual. Acknowledge, confirm what was captured, and say a person will follow up. Promises about outcomes and timelines belong to your team.

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4. Escalate and route

• Planning Prompt escalation triggers. Fini’s default Escalation Topics already include regulator or ombudsman complaints and threats of legal action. Add your own, for example unauthorized transactions or account-takeover signals. See Prompts.
• Agent groups. For widget and native email tickets, map your complaint and dispute tags to an agent group such as Disputes. When the agent escalates, Fini routes the ticket to that group and assigns an available member. See Agent groups.
• Helpdesk routing. For helpdesk channels, the escalation and internal note land in the ticket in your helpdesk; route from there with your helpdesk’s own rules.

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5. Guard the wording of every reply

Add Guardrails that check replies before delivery:

• A Custom rule that fails any reply promising a refund, credit, reversal or resolution date, or admitting or denying fault.
• Banned terms for phrases your compliance team has ruled out.
• Confidential attributes for account data that must never appear in a reply.

A failing reply is rewritten once; if the rewrite still fails, Fini sends a handoff message and escalates. Guardrails are not fail-closed, so a check error can let the original reply through. Review the per-check verdicts in AI Steps, and rely on Reply Rules, not Guardrails, for categories where the agent must never reply.

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6. Audit what happened

Every Fini reply carries an AI Steps trace in Inbox. For a complaint or dispute conversation it shows: To review a period, filter Inbox by Tags (your complaint tags) and date range, and save it as a View. Use Feedback Notes to record reviewer findings on individual replies. Analytics breaks conversations down by tag and shows escalation reasons.

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7. Test before and after every change

Build a Test Suite set for this flow:

• Use the Escalation behavior judge, edited to your policy: pass when complaints and disputes escalate or receive only the approved acknowledgment, fail when the agent resolves them alone.
• Add a second set with the Safety & boundaries judge to catch promises and legal-sounding statements.
• Seed scenarios from real Inbox conversations tagged as complaints, plus hand-written edge cases in a CSV: indirect complaints, a dispute raised mid-conversation about something else, a customer who mentions a regulator.

Run both sets after every prompt, knowledge, tag or rule change. Pass rate history shows whether a change made the agent better or worse at recognizing these conversations.

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