Orchestration-Free Customer Service Automation: A Privacy-Preserving and Flowchart-Guided Framework
Organizations: Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China · AI Group, WeBank, Shenzhen, China
Abstract
Customer service automation has seen growing demand within digital transformation. Existing approaches either rely on modular system designs with extensive agent orchestration or employ over-simplified instruction schemas, providing limited guidance and poor generalizability. This paper introduces an orchestration-free framework using Task-Oriented Flowcharts (TOFs) to enable end-to-end automation without manual intervention. We first define the components and evaluation metrics for TOFs, then formalize a cost-efficient flowchart construction algorithm to abstract procedural knowledge from service dialogues. We emphasize local deployment of small language models and propose decentralized distillation with flowcharts to mitigate data scarcity and privacy issues in model training. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness in various service tasks, with superior quantitative and application performance compared to strong baselines and market products. By releasing a web-based system demonstration with case studies, we aim to promote streamlined creation of future service automation.
Figures & tables
| Method | Attraction | Hotel | Restaurant | Taxi | Train | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPC | UMR | CPC | UMR | CPC | UMR | CPC | UMR | CPC | UMR | |
| Human-Annotated | 0.86 | 0.8176 | 0.76 | 0.7966 | 0.80 | 0.8071 | 0.92 | 0.6728 | 0.84 | 0.7183 |
| Abstraction-Based | 0.80 | 0.7958 | 0.64 | 0.8103 | 0.74 | 0.8044 | 0.90 | 0.6843 | 0.74 | 0.7987 |
| Iterative Construction | 0.92 | 0.9436 | 0.80 | 0.8209 | 0.90 | 0.9087 | 0.88 | 0.8221 | 0.88 | 0.8277 |
| MultiWOZ | SGD | |||
| Method | # Dialog | # Utterances | # Dialog | # Utterances |
| Unweighted DIC | ||||
| Greedy | 57 | 1012 | 23 | 318 |
| LP-Rounding | 67 | 1140 | 37 | 596 |
| ILP | 43 | 766 | 21 | 344 |
| Weighted DIC | ||||
| MultiWOZ | SGD | ||||
| Method | Inform | Success | Book | Inform | Success |
| Training-based Approaches | |||||
| SimpleTOD | 84.4 | 70.1 | - | 12.7 | 9.8 |
| UBAR | 83.4 | 70.3 | - | - | - |
| GALAXY | 85.4 | 75.7 | - | - | - |
| Mars | 88.9 | 78.0 | - | - | - |
| Tasks | Description |
|---|---|
| Verification | Validates correct, incorrect, or missing inputs with robust error handling. |
| Credit Limit | Guides users through credit limit increases via online banking or mobile apps. |
| Account Inquiry | Manages balance inquiries and unknown transaction investigations with accurate data retrieval and issue resolution. |
| Travel Notification | Facilitates the setup of overseas travel alerts with app guidance or direct assistance. |
| Open Questions | Addresses queries on wallet deposits, age limits, loan rates, and product recommendations. |
Appendix figures & tables1 asset
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Customer Support Automation
Customer support automation uses AI agents, retrieval, and workflow tools to resolve inquiries, assist service staff, and streamline customer operations.
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