What does an Order Support FTE own?
An Order Support FTE on ftes.ai owns the post-purchase support of an online store as a job function: every ticket that begins after an order is placed. That means where-is-my-order questions, address and order edits before dispatch, return and exchange requests, damaged and missing item claims, and the follow-ups each of those generates. It is accountable for one outcome, post-purchase tickets resolved inside policy with sensitive ones escalated, and it is reviewed on targets such as first-reply time and escalation accuracy.
It does not own the policy. The owner writes the return window, the refund limit, the goodwill limit, the exchange rules and the list of what always goes to a person. The Order Support FTE works inside those rules, in the help desk the team already uses, and never invents an exception.
Where does each reply get its facts?
Every reply the Order Support FTE writes is built from three records it reads before answering: the order in the store platform, the shipment and its latest carrier scan, and the relevant excerpt of the store's policy. A where-is-my-order reply states the carrier's last scan and the delivery estimate from the shipping data, not a generic reassurance. A return reply states whether the order is inside the window and what the policy allows for that product category.
The three records are attached to the reply in the help desk, so a person reviewing the ticket later sees exactly what the FTE saw. A reply the FTE cannot ground in those records is not sent; the ticket is escalated with a note saying what was missing.
What are the hard limits?
The Order Support FTE works under limits the owner sets in Setup that no autonomy level can cross: a maximum refund it may issue without a person, a maximum goodwill credit, the return window, the exchange rules per product category, and a list of situations that always escalate, such as a legal threat, a safety complaint, a chargeback mention or a repeat claim from the same address. A request above any limit is escalated with the evidence, never resolved by the FTE.
The limits are separate from the autonomy ladder. At Level 0 every reply waits in Approvals; as the record builds, routine order-status replies can be promoted to send without a gate. The refund limit stays exactly where the owner put it regardless.
How does it turn refunds into exchanges?
Where the store's policy allows, the Order Support FTE answers a refund request with an exchange or store credit offer first, stated plainly with what the customer would receive and how quickly, and it accepts the refund without argument if the customer still wants one and the request is inside the limit. The customer's choice is logged on the ticket, so the exchanges-versus-refunds number the owner sees is measured, not inferred.
It does not pressure, and it does not offer an exchange the policy does not permit for that product or that reason. A damaged-item claim, for example, follows the damaged-item rule the owner wrote, which may be a replacement without a return.
What gets escalated, and with what?
The Order Support FTE escalates any ticket that exceeds a limit, falls outside policy, matches the always-escalate list, or that it cannot ground in the order and shipment records. An escalation arrives with the full thread, the order, the carrier scan, the policy excerpt that applies, the FTE's summary of what the customer wants and why it could not resolve it, and a suggested resolution the person can accept or change.
The point is that a person decides in minutes with everything in front of them, rather than reopening four systems to find out what happened. Escalation accuracy, the share of escalations a person agreed were correctly escalated, is one of the numbers the owner reviews.
What does it report, and how honestly?
The Order Support FTE reports five numbers it measures in the help desk: tickets resolved inside policy, first-reply time, escalations and their accuracy, exchanges versus refunds by the customer's logged choice, and the questions it answered most often. The last one is the most useful over time, because a question asked hundreds of times is a policy page or a shipping notification that should change, and the FTE proposes that change in the monthly review.
It does not report customer satisfaction unless the store measures it, and it does not claim a reduction in ticket volume that it cannot attribute. A spike in claims is reported as a spike with the tickets as evidence, not explained away.
Which tools does it work in?
The Order Support FTE works inside the store's help desk, currently Gorgias, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom and Re:amaze, with read access to orders and shipments from Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce and from shipping and returns tools such as ShipStation and Loop Returns. Its work is reviewed in the ftes.ai workspace, credentials are encrypted at rest and revocable, and it draws tokens from the organization wallet with a hard stop at zero.
It does not require the team to move help desks. Replies, tags and escalations happen in the tool the team already opens every morning, so a person who takes over a ticket sees the FTE's work as ordinary ticket history.