Evaluating LLMs as Agentic Workflow Executors in Real-World Customer Support Skills
cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-10-09
Updated: 2026-10-14
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Enterprise customer-support agents increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to execute bounded, tool-using workflows.
Abstract
Enterprise customer-support agents increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to execute bounded, tool-using workflows. We study this problem through the lens of Skill LLMs: specialized executors that operate within a selected skill context and must complete a narrow, stateful workflow under policy and tool constraints. We present a benchmark construction pipeline that mines recurrent workflows from real-world transcripts, converts them into structured skill descriptions, maps them to tool requirements, simulates environment state with Model Context Protocol (MCP)-compatible mocks, and generates multi-turn tool-using dialogues. Using this benchmark, we conduct a large-scale zero-shot evaluation of 17 language models spanning closed model families and deployment-oriented open-weight models from 1.7B to 14B parameters, each judged independently by five strong LLM judges, plus a deterministic rule-based evaluator that checks tool coverage, hallucinated tool use, and unsupported claims. We find a consistent ranking in which GPT-5.4 leads by a wide margin and QWEN3.5-9B is the strongest open-weight model (below 20B), outperforming several closed baselines under every judge. We also find that judge choice is not a negligible methodological detail: pairwise judge agreement on the pass/fail verdict averages Kappa=0.524 across 10 judge pairs. These results suggest that comprehensive zero-shot evaluation of skill execution requires judge reliability as carefully as model capability.
Sources
- $\tau^2$-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environment
- Gemma 4 Technical Report
- SkillOrchestra: Learning to Route Agents via Skill Transfer
- Agent Skills for Large Language Models: Architecture, Acquisition, Security, and the Path Forward
- $\tau$-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains
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