Ombudsman referral

Meridian Mobile internal policy · section 7.1 · fictional, written by the team

If a customer mentions the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, the TIO, or says they intend to make a formal complaint, the agent must:

1. Escalate to a team leader before the call ends. 2. Record the mention on the case verbatim. 3. Not attempt to talk the customer out of it, and not suggest it will delay their resolution.

Meridian Mobile has 10 business days to resolve a matter referred by the TIO before it becomes a formal investigation, which carries a per-case fee regardless of the outcome. A matter that comes back to the Ombudsman after referral is the most expensive outcome available to us, which is why early escalation is cheaper than being right.

The rest of the policy

2.1 Callback commitment 2.2 Case ownership 7.2 Retention and churn intent 6.1 Contradictory answers 5.2 Escalation on request 3.1 Fault tickets 8.1 Plan changes 4.1 Refund window 5.1 Repeat contact 3.2 Total loss of service 4.2 Unauthorised add-ons

Twelve documents, retrieved with BM25 in plain Python — no vector store. Over a corpus this size, written in the same register as the questions, lexical matching finds the right rule with no index to build and no service to call mid-conversation. Past a few hundred documents that argument flips; it is one function behind one interface.