pandas >= 0.25.0
Since pandas version 0.25.0 we have named aggregations where we can groupby, aggregate and at the same time assign new names to our columns. This way we won't get the MultiIndex columns, and the column names make more sense given the data they contain:
aggregate and get a list of strings
grp = df.groupby('A').agg(B_sum=('B','sum'),
C=('C', list)).reset_index()
print(grp)
A B_sum C
0 1 1.615586 [This, string]
1 2 0.421821 [is, !]
2 3 0.463468 [a]
3 4 0.643961 [random]
aggregate and join the strings
grp = df.groupby('A').agg(B_sum=('B','sum'),
C=('C', ', '.join)).reset_index()
print(grp)
A B_sum C
0 1 1.615586 This, string
1 2 0.421821 is, !
2 3 0.463468 a
3 4 0.643961 random