@inproceedings{gou-etal-2025-advancing,
    title = "Advancing {E}-commerce Merchants Telemarketing with Synthetic Data-Driven {LLM}s",
    author = "Gou, Qi  and
      Xia, Zehua  and
      Juan, Li  and
      Zhao, Qingyang  and
      Yang, Wenjing",
    editor = "Potdar, Saloni  and
      Rojas-Barahona, Lina  and
      Montella, Sebastien",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou (China)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-industry.150/",
    pages = "2146--2154",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-333-3",
    abstract = "Telemarketing towards merchants is considerably more complex than traditional dialogue systems. Given a user utterance, the response must not only follow the context but also strategically and naturally guide the conversation toward marketing objectives. A common approach is to fine-tune LLMs using high-quality dialogue data from top sales. However, we find that even after careful data cleaning, these data cannot be used directly due to two issues:(1) Poor strategy-following: Real-world conversations are highly random with much chit-chat topics, easily leading deviation from intended strategy.(2) Insufficient expert knowledge learning: Expert knowledge appears infrequently or not at all in limited collected corpus.To this end, we introduce a hybrid data synthesis framework with two main innovations. First, we unify the input schema with profile and strategy designed by top sales, and extract them via a Multi-task paradigm.In addition, we propose Role-playing Simulation and Session Prefix Completion to complementarily improve the strategy-following and inject long-tail expert knowledge into our fine-tuned model {--} TeleBot.Comprehensive online and offline evaluations demonstrate its effectiveness.In particular, in terms of the final marketing results {--} High Intention Rate, TeleBot reaches the performance level of the top 25{\%} of human sales."
}