The business
Cedar Ridge Outfitters, based in Denver, Colorado, sells camping, climbing and paddling gear online in North America. Its support team of 45 people handles about 52,000 contacts a month: returns, damaged deliveries, billing disputes, loyalty points and account changes.
The agent
Cedar Ridge is building a support agent with the Claude Agent SDK. It talks to customers in chat and reaches backend systems only through four custom MCP tools on a server named support:
| Tool | What it does | Notes |
|---|---|---|
get_customer | Finds a customer by email, phone, account number or name | Name searches can return several matches |
lookup_order | Returns one order by order number | Returns about 40 fields; returns use about 6 of them |
process_refund | Issues a refund to the original payment method | Amount in dollars and cents |
escalate_to_human | Opens a ticket in the human queue | Human agents do not see the chat transcript |
Targets and rules
- First-contact resolution: 80% or better. Today's human-only figure is 64%.
- Identity first. The customer must be verified with
get_customerbefore any order lookup or refund. - Refund limit. The agent may refund up to $500 on its own. Anything larger needs a human.
- Policy. Returns are accepted within 45 days. Price adjustments apply only to purchases on Cedar Ridge's own site; the policy says nothing about matching competitors.
- Escalate when the customer asks for a person, when policy is silent or ambiguous, or when the agent cannot make progress.
Known data quirks
get_customerreturns timestamps as Unix epoch seconds;lookup_orderreturns ISO 8601 strings;process_refundreturns a numeric status (0success,2pending,5rejected).- About 3% of chats mention two or more separate problems in one message.
- Long chats (20+ turns) are where most wrong amounts and mixed-up order numbers appear in testing.
People
| Stakeholder | Cares most about |
|---|---|
| Head of Customer Care (sponsor) | Resolution rate and customer satisfaction |
| Finance controller | No refunds above the limit, ever |
| Support team lead | Clean handoffs her team can act on without re-asking the customer |
| Platform engineer | A loop and hooks that are simple to reason about |