Generate Empathetic Customer Replies with Claude AI and Auto-Escalation

🧠 Overview Generate empathetic, professional reply drafts for customer or user messages.
The workflow detects sentiment, tone, and risk level, drafts a concise response, sanitizes PII/links/emojis, and auto-escalates risky or low-confidence cases to human review.

⚙️ How It Works Input — Manual Test or Webhook Trigger
AI Agent (Empathy) — returns { sentiment, tone, reply, confidence, needs_handover }
Post-Process & Sanitize — removes URLs/hashtags, masks PII, caps length
Risk & Handover Rules — checks confidence threshold, risk words, and negativity
Routing — auto-send safe replies or flag to Needs Review

🧩 Setup Instructions (3–5 min) Open Set Config1 and adjust: MAX_LEN (default 600) ADD_FOLLOWUP_QUESTION (true/false) FORMALITY (auto | casual | polite) EMOJI_ALLOWED (true/false), BLOCK_LINKS (true/false) RISK_WORDS (e.g., refund, lawsuit, self-harm) Connect Anthropic credential to Anthropic Chat Model (Optional) Replace Manual Trigger with Webhook Trigger for real-time use

> Tip: If you need to show literal angle brackets in messages, use backticks like <example> (no HTML entities needed).

📚 Use Cases

1. SaaS Billing Complaints Input:** “I was billed after canceling. This is unacceptable.”
   Output:** Calm, apologetic reply with refund steps; escalates if refund is in RISK_WORDS or confidence < 0.45.

2. Product Bug Reports Input:** “Upload fails on large files since yesterday.”
   Output:** Acknowledges impact, requests logs, offers workaround; routes to auto-send if low risk and high confidence.

3. Delivery/Logistics Delays Input:** “My order is late again. Should I file a complaint?”
   Output:** Empathetic apology, ETA guidance, partial credit policy note; escalates if language indicates legal action.

4. Community Moderation / Abuse Input:** “Support is useless—you’re all scammers.”
   Output:** De-escalating, policy-aligned response; auto-flags due to negative sentiment + risk keyword match.

5. Safety / Self-harm Mentions Input:** “I feel like hurting myself if this isn’t fixed.”
   Output:* Immediate escalation*, inserts approved resources; never auto-sends.

🚨 Auto-Escalation Rules (defaults) Negative** sentiment Message matches any RISK_WORDS confidence < 0.45 Mentions of legal, harassment, or self-harm context

🧪 Notes & Best Practices 🔐 No hardcoded API keys — use n8n Credentials 🧭 Tune thresholds and RISK_WORDS to your org policy 🧩 Works on self-hosted or cloud n8n ✅ Treat outputs as drafts; ship after human/policy review

🔗 Resources GitHub (template JSON):** https://github.com/yskmtb0714/n8n-workflows/blob/main/empathy-reply-assistant.json