In plain words: Instead of labeling in batches, customer support agents tag daily work — which reply is better, whether they used it, what's missing — feeding straight into the AI's updates. A live pilot found 11.7% more of the relevant knowledge and cut retraining from months to weeks.
Abstract · Agent-in-the-Loop: A Data Flywheel for Continuous Improvement in LLM-based Customer Support
We introduce an Agent-in-the-Loop (AITL) framework that implements a continuous data flywheel for iteratively improving an LLM-based customer support system. Unlike standard offline approaches that rely on batch annotations, AITL integrates four key types of annotations directly into live customer operations: (1) pairwise response preferences, (2) agent adoption and rationales, (3) knowledge relevance checks, and (4) identification of missing knowledge. These feedback signals seamlessly feed back into models' updates, reducing retraining cycles from months to weeks. Our production pilot involving US-based customer support agents demonstrated significant improvements in retrieval accuracy (+11.7% recall@75, +14.8% precision@8), generation quality (+8.4% helpfulness) and agent adoption rates (+4.5%). These results underscore the effectiveness of embedding human feedback loops directly into operational workflows to continuously refine LLM-based customer support system.
Cen Mia Zhao, Tiantian Zhang, Hanchen Su, Yufeng Wayne Zhang, Shaowei Su, Mingzhi Xu, Yu Elaine Liu, Wei Han, Jeremy Werner, Claire Na Cheng, Yashar Mehdad
arXiv:2510.06674 · cs.AI · submitted Oct 8, 2025 · updated Oct 9, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · EMNLP 2025 Industry Track submission (Paper #305). Preprint. Main text within the 7-page industry limit (references/appendices excluded). Contains multiple figures and tables