CCARF Practice Question

Paper 1 · Question 40

D5 Context Management & Reliability · Paper 1

A customer support agent achieves only 55% first-contact resolution, well below the 80% target. Logs show it escalates straightforward damage replacement cases while attempting to autonomously handle complex policy exception requests. What is the most effective improvement?

• A.Implement sentiment analysis to detect customer frustration and automatically escalate when negative sentiment exceeds a threshold
• B.Have the agent self-report a confidence score (1-10) and automatically route to humans when confidence falls below a threshold
• C.Add explicit escalation criteria to the system prompt with few-shot examples demonstrating when to escalate versus resolve autonomously
• D.Deploy a separate classifier model trained on historical tickets to predict which requests need escalation

Show answer & explanations

Correct answer: C

A: Sentiment does not correlate with case complexity. This would escalate frustrated but straightforward cases and miss calm but complex ones.

B: LLM self-reported confidence is poorly calibrated — the agent is already incorrectly confident on hard cases and uncertain on easy ones.

C: This directly addresses unclear decision boundaries with concrete examples. It is the proportionate first response before adding infrastructure.

D: This is over-engineered, requiring labelled data and ML infrastructure when prompt optimisation has not been tried first.

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