If a caller rang to ask where their order had got to, your receptionist asked them for the order number — and then, depending on how they answered, sometimes treated the whole call as a refund request. A caller who replied “the order number is 4471” was asked what had gone wrong with the order. Nothing had gone wrong. They wanted a delivery date.
It came down to the wording. Answering with just the number worked correctly; answering with the words “the order number is” in front of it did not, and that is the more natural way to say it. Once the call had gone that way it stayed there, so everything the caller said afterwards was treated as part of a complaint they had never made.
An order enquiry is now answered with the order’s actual status. A real refund request is still picked up and handled exactly as before — that half was checked as carefully as the fix itself.