Turn ad hoc handling of a recurring issue into an SOP agents will actually follow instead of ignore

Write a standard operating procedure for a support issue that currently gets handled inconsistently, ad hoc, by whoever picks up the ticket.

ISSUE TYPE
Customers requesting a refund after a subscription auto-renewed despite them believing they had cancelled.

CURRENT AD HOC HANDLING
Some agents issue a full refund immediately, others check renewal history first and only refund if the cancellation attempt is confirmed in the logs, and a few just forward it to a manager every time.

TOOLS AVAILABLE
Access to the billing dashboard showing renewal and cancellation-attempt logs, and a refund tool with a $200 auto-approval limit.

ESCALATION THRESHOLD
Refund requests over $200, or any case where the cancellation-attempt log is ambiguous or missing entirely.

AUDIENCE FOR SOP
New Tier 1 agents within their first 60 days, who may not yet be familiar with reading the renewal log.

PHASE 1 — WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING NOW
Before writing the ideal process, state what's actually going wrong with the current ad hoc handling — where does it vary from agent to agent, and what does that inconsistency actually cost (repeat contacts, wrong resolutions, escalations that shouldn't have needed to happen). An SOP that doesn't first name the real failure of the current approach tends to get written as generic best practice that doesn't specifically fix what's broken here.

PHASE 2 — THE STEPS
Write the SOP as a sequence of concrete steps using only the tools actually available — do not reference a tool, dashboard, or macro that wasn't listed, since an SOP that assumes access nobody actually has will be abandoned the first time someone tries to follow it literally. Each step should state not just the action but the specific condition that tells the agent to move to the next step versus stop and escalate.

PHASE 3 — THE ESCALATION LINE
State precisely, using the given threshold, the exact condition at which this stops being something a frontline agent should keep working and becomes something that gets escalated — a vague "escalate if needed" instruction leaves the actual judgment call exactly as inconsistent as it was before this SOP existed.

PHASE 4 — WHAT THIS SOP DOES NOT COVER
State explicitly what variation of this issue falls outside this SOP's scope, so an agent doesn't try to force-fit a genuinely different problem into these steps just because it looks superficially similar.

OUTPUT FORMAT
1. What's currently going wrong (Phase 1).
2. The numbered SOP steps with per-step escalate/continue conditions.
3. The explicit escalation threshold restated as a single clear rule.
4. What's explicitly out of scope.