A Policy-Aligned Agentic RAG Framework for Risk-Aware Decision Support in Enterprise Customer Relationship Management
Enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) systems function as decision-support environments where AI-generated recommendations can directly affect customer rights, refund eligibility, service level commitments, and privacy-sensitive decisions. Existing generative AI approaches for CRM, including standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), lack dedicated mechanisms for policy validation, risk-aware escalation, and decision auditability. This study proposes the Policy-Aligned Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (PAL-CRM-RAG) framework for risk-aware intelligent decision support in enterprise CRM. The framework integrates ten processing layers encompassing CRM query understanding, risk-aware intent classification, hybrid BM25 and dense vector retrieval, reciprocal rank fusion, cross-encoder reranking, policy validation, agentic control, evidence-grounded generation, self-verification, and human escalation with audit logging. Using a synthetic CRM ticket corpus of 20,000 records across five issue categories and a constructed policy-knowledge corpus of 30 documents spanning six policy groups, PAL-CRM-RAG is evaluated against six baseline systems across retrieval quality, generation faithfulness, policy compliance, unsafe response rate, escalation accuracy, and response latency. Risk classification across three classes (Low, Medium, High) achieves an accuracy of 95.1% and a macro-F1 of 94.4%. PAL-CRM-RAG achieves a policy compliance rate of 100% and an escalation F1 of 1.000, compared with 0% compliance for the non-RAG baseline, and 90% compliance for the strongest retrieval-only baseline. An ablation study confirms that each architectural module contributes measurably, with removal of the policy validator reducing compliance to zero and removal of the risk classifier eliminating all escalation capability. These results demonstrate that policy alignment and risk-aware escalation can be operationalised within an Agentic RAG pipeline for enterprise CRM, advancing intelligent decision support theory and the practical governance of generative AI in customer service information systems.