Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Orchestration-Free Customer Service Automation: A Privacy-Preserving and Flowchart-Guided Framework

Mengze Hong, Chen Jason Zhang, Zichang Guo, Hanlin Gu, Di Jiang, Li Qing

TL;DR

This paper introduces an orchestration-free framework using Task-Oriented Flowcharts (TOFs) to enable end-to-end automation without manual intervention, and defines the components and evaluation metrics for TOFs, then formalizes a cost-efficient flowchart construction algorithm to abstract procedural knowledge from service dialogues.

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.

Orchestration-Free Customer Service Automation: A Privacy-Preserving and Flowchart-Guided Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces an orchestration-free framework using Task-Oriented Flowcharts (TOFs) to enable end-to-end automation without manual intervention, and defines the components and evaluation metrics for TOFs, then formalizes a cost-efficient flowchart construction algorithm to abstract procedural knowledge from service dialogues.

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.
Paper Structure (37 sections, 1 theorem, 15 equations, 8 figures, 4 tables, 2 algorithms)

This paper contains 37 sections, 1 theorem, 15 equations, 8 figures, 4 tables, 2 algorithms.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Customer Service Automation
  4. Flowchart Understanding and Application
  5. Task-Oriented Flowchart
  6. Definition and Composition
  7. Flowchart Evaluation
  8. Methodology
  9. Flowchart Construction with Dialogue Data
  10. Dialogue Selection
  11. Flowchart Construction
  12. Flowchart-Guided Customer Service Automation Framework
  13. Flowchart-Augmented Task Coordination
  14. Synthetic Data Generation for Model Training
  15. Experiments
  16. ...and 22 more sections

Key Result

Theorem B.1

The WDIC coverage function is submodular and non-decreasing.

Figures (8)

  • Figure 1: Comparison of agent orchestration-based (top) and flowchart-guided (bottom) system for service automation.
  • Figure 2: System overview: orchestration-free and privacy-preserving customer service automation driven by 1) flowchart-augmented task coordination and 2) flowchart-guided synthetic data generation for model distillation.
  • Figure 3: Decentralized flowchart distillation framework.
  • Figure 4: Comparison of Exemplary Rate and Completion Rate for four customer service outbound automations.
  • Figure 5: Human evaluation of proactive outbound systems across five technical aspects (0 = worst, 4 = best).
  • ...and 3 more figures

Theorems & Definitions (2)

  • Theorem B.1
  • Definition B.2: Submodularity