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arXiv · 2601.00596

Beyond IVR: Benchmarking Customer Support LLM Agents for Business-Adherence

Sumanth Balaji·Piyush Mishra·Aashraya Sachdeva·Suraj Agrawal
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Abstract

Traditional customer support systems, such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), rely on rigid scripts and lack the flexibility required for handling complex, policy-driven tasks. While large language model (LLM) agents offer a promising alternative, evaluating their ability to act in accordance with business rules and real-world support workflows remains an open challenge. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on tool usage or task completion, overlooking an agent's capacity to adhere to multi-step policies, navigate task dependencies, and remain robust to unpredictable user or environment behavior. In this work, we introduce JourneyBench, a benchmark designed to assess policy-aware agents in customer support. JourneyBench leverages graph representations to generate diverse, realistic support scenarios and proposes the User Journey Coverage Score, a novel metric to measure policy adherence. We evaluate multiple state-of-the-art LLMs using two agent designs: a Static-Prompt Agent (SPA) and a Dynamic-Prompt Agent (DPA) that explicitly models policy control. Across 703 conversations in three domains, we show that DPA significantly boosts policy adherence, even allowing smaller models like GPT-4o-mini to outperform more capable ones like GPT-4o. Our findings demonstrate the importance of structured orchestration and establish JourneyBench as a critical resource to advance AI-driven customer support beyond IVR-era limitations.

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Sumanth Balaji, Piyush Mishra, Aashraya Sachdeva, Suraj Agrawal. 2026-01-02. Beyond IVR: Benchmarking Customer Support LLM Agents for Business-Adherence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00596

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