Tessaly put 40 agents on a new refund queue in 4 days

Three tabs for every refund

Before Chamfer, a Tessaly agent handling a refund had three tabs open: the booking in an internal admin page, the payment in Stripe and the guest’s messages in Zendesk. Any refund over $500 needed a team lead, and the approval happened in a chat thread that nobody could search later.

The queue grew every summer. In August 2025 the median refund took three days, and finance found 60 duplicate refunds during that quarter’s reconciliation. Agents also had to remember which markets allowed partial refunds, and new starters learned the rules by asking around.

One paragraph on Monday

Ines Albrecht, Support Operations Lead, wrote the request as a single paragraph on the Bench. Pull open refund requests from Zendesk. Show the booking from Postgres and the charge from Stripe. Send anything over $500 to a second approver.

A working queue was ready within the hour. Ines shared it with four senior agents that afternoon, and their feedback went straight back into the prompt. The team spent two days on the details only support agents know, such as partial refunds for early checkouts and the right reply template for each reason code. Tessaly’s security team reviewed the roles on Wednesday and approved the release. On Thursday, 40 agents signed in with their Tessaly Google accounts and started working the queue.

Actions taken in the app write back to Zendesk as internal notes, so the ticket history stays complete for anyone who opens it later.

Two people above $500

The approval rule that used to live in a chat thread is now a Sign-off. A refund over $500 can’t reach Stripe until a second person approves it, and the Logbook records both names, the amount and the reason. Agents see only the markets they cover, and nobody outside finance sees a guest’s payment details.

Tessaly’s trust and risk team liked the pattern enough to reuse it. Their Payout Review app holds flagged host payouts for review, with an Operator that suggests a decision based on similar past cases. A person still presses Release or Hold.

“The rules we used to explain in training are now in the app,” Ines says. “A new agent can’t skip the second approver, even on a busy Saturday.”

What changed

• Refund queue live in 4 days and worked by 40 agents

• Median refund time down from 3 days to 19 hours

• No duplicate refunds found in the two quarters since launch

Tessaly now runs 9 apps on Chamfer, and support team leads build most of them. Next is a host verification queue for new listings in Italy.