TelBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Telco-Specific Large Language Models

AbstractThe telecommunications industry, characterized by its vast customer base and complex service offerings, necessitates a high level of domain expertise and proficiency in customer service center operations. Consequently, there is a growing demand for Large Language Models (LLMs) to augment the capabilities of customer service representatives. This paper introduces a methodology for developing a specialized Telecommunications LLM (Telco LLM) designed to enhance the efficiency of customer service agents and promote consistency in service quality across representatives. We present the construction process of TelBench, a novel dataset created for performance evaluation of customer service expertise in the telecommunications domain. We also evaluate various LLMs and demonstrate the ability to benchmark both proprietary and open-source LLMs on predefined telecommunications-related tasks, thereby establishing metrics that define telcommunications performance.