Route Before Response: Fail-Closed Routing for LLM-Enabled Customer-Service Software

Yuchen Cao, Zhenyu Mao, Jacky Wai Keung, Yifei Wang, Guancheng Lin +1

LLM-enabled customer-service software in financial institutions must choose a downstream service before responding. Classifiers and LLM routers can identify a relevant label or destination, but a composed application must still verify dispatch permission and entity registration. We study this integration problem as boundary-aware pre-response routing. We present RouteBR, a controller in which one model call proposes a primary service action and registered object, then deterministic code checks identifiers and versioned rules before dispatch or a specified non-dispatch outcome. Lower-ranked candidates cannot replace a blocked primary route. We construct 600 privacy-preserving scenarios from recurring confidential-request patterns at a real financial institution; three engineers jointly reviewed the scenarios and labels. On the 200-case CONFIRM MAIN split, RouteBR reaches 97.5% final-path exact match. A matched one-call baseline given the same rules reaches 95.5%, whereas a diagnostic baseline without the rule program obtains 94.0% action accuracy but only 41.0% final-path exact match. Across 166 non-dispatch MAIN and FLIP cases, RouteBR produces no false dispatch. The artifact…