CCARF Practice Question

Paper 3 · Question 6

D2 Tool Design & MCP Integration · Paper 3

[Scenario 1: Customer Support Resolution Agent] You are building a customer support resolution agent with the Claude Agent SDK. It handles high-ambiguity requests (returns, billing disputes, account issues) via custom MCP tools — get_customer, lookup_order, process_refund, escalate_to_human — targeting 80%+ first-contact resolution while knowing when to escalate. When process_refund fails for any reason, it currently returns the string “Operation failed.” The agent responds by retrying policy-blocked refunds and giving up on temporary outages — the opposite of correct. What is the fix?

• A.Instruct the agent in the system prompt to always retry exactly twice
• B.Remove failure responses entirely so the agent never sees errors
• C.Have the agent apologize to the customer whenever any error occurs
• D.Return structured error metadata: an errorCategory (transient / validation / business / permission), an isRetryable boolean, and a human-readable description the agent can act on

Show answer & explanations

Correct answer: D

A: hard-codes one recovery strategy for error types that need different ones

B: removes the signal instead of enriching it

C: treats communication as a substitute for correct recovery logic

D: Uniform error strings deny the agent the information recovery decisions require. Structured metadata — category, retryability, description — lets it retry transient failures, explain business refusals, and stop wasting attempts on non-retryable errors.

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