Approval model
SophMate is designed around reviewable action plans. Read-only answers can stay conversational, but changes to products, coupons, customers, published content, theme styling, tools, or settings should become plans that explain risk and affected records. This keeps AI assistance close to WordPress while preserving human review.
Reviewer ownership
Assign reviewers by risk area. Store owners should review coupon and product changes, developers should review custom tools and Theme Assistant CSS, and support leads should review customer-facing reply drafts. The approval feature explains the product surface, while workflow safety docs cover automation-specific guardrails.
Operating rule
Do not bulk approve mixed-risk plans. Separate commerce, support, visual, and system changes so the reviewer can understand the exact impact before execution.
Owner and cadence
- Primary owner: account owner, agency lead, privacy owner, or operations lead depending on risk area.
- Review cadence: monthly, after incidents, after staff changes, and before client or stakeholder reporting.
- Escalate when ownership, approval, privacy, backup, audit, or client-reporting decisions are unclear.
Production checklist
- Separate customer, commerce, content, theme, system, and workflow decisions into reviewable plans.
- Assign reviewers by risk area instead of relying on one generic administrator.
- Assign owners for approval policy, audit review, retention, privacy handling, backup validation, and support escalation.
- Keep governance decisions visible in onboarding notes so agencies, developers, support leads, and store owners do not invent separate rules.
Acceptance checks
- A reviewer can see affected records, risk, proposed change, and execution result before approving more work.
- Bulk approval is not used for mixed-risk plans.
- A reviewer can identify the accountable owner for customer, commerce, theme, privacy, and provider decisions.
- The team has a repeatable monthly review for budgets, audit events, permissions, retention, and unresolved incidents.
Common mistakes
- Treating governance as a one-time setup task instead of a recurring review of roles, budgets, approvals, retention, and audit records.
- Sharing diagnostics, screenshots, or client reports before removing secrets and unrelated private data.
Related operations
- Review the approval feature.
- Pair approvals with Audit Log Review.
- Use Backup and Staging Workflow before high-risk changes.
- Use Regulated Claims and Legal Review before publishing sensitive claims.
- Use Access Offboarding and Seat Review after staff, contractor, or agency changes.
- Use Privacy and Data Retention before sharing support evidence.
- Use Privacy Export and Erase Requests before handling requester data.
- Use WooCommerce High-Risk Actions before store-changing work.
- Use Personalization Privacy Review before visitor targeting launches.
- Use Storefront Panel Consent Review before launching visitor-facing panels.