One of Zendesk Support’s most popular features is our built-in customer satisfaction survey. Customer satisfaction allows you to track how well your agents and customer service organization as a whole are performing on a ticket by ticket basis. Because of our simplified approach, on average our customers see a roughly 21% response rate - which is fantastic! Zendesk Support provides some great defaults for the survey, but we get a lot of questions about how to further customize the customer satisfaction experience. Here are some tips to help you make the most of your customer satisfaction survey.
Enabling the customer satisfaction feature
To enable customer satisfaction surveys, click the Admin icon ( 
) in the sidebar, then select Settings > Customers > Satisfaction .
When you enable customer satisfaction, a pre-built automation is automatically created for you. To see this automation:
- Click the Admin icon ( ) in the sidebar
- Select Business Rules > Automations
- Open Request customer satisfaction rating (System Automation).
It’s set up by default to send a customer satisfaction survey to your customers 24 hours after their ticket has been solved (not closed). We’ve found that this setup works really well for most companies that have a longer response cycle.
The default conditions for the system customer satisfaction automation:
Customizing when and how the customer satisfaction is requested
But that’s not the end of the story... you can customize the customer satisfaction survey to meet your needs. Customer satisfaction is really nothing but a placeholder that you can use in any notification sent out by a trigger or automation. Yes, Zendesk Support provides you with a system automation specifically for customer satisfaction, but you can modify it, or even remove it altogether and trade it in for a trigger.
As I pointed out earlier, the automation is defaulted to 24 hours. However, you can easily increase or decrease the length of time between when the ticket is solved and when the survey is sent by editing the automation:
If you’re taking advantage of user and organization tagging, you may want to send customer satisfaction to only a subset of your user base. For example, do you want to make sure users tagged with “partner” never get a customer satisfaction survey? Add this condition under “ALL”:
Are you afraid that users are receiving too much email? Consider combining the “solved” email notification with the customer satisfaction survey. To achieve this, simply deactivate the customer satisfaction automation, then go into triggers and edit your “solved” notification trigger. Add the customer satisfaction placeholder {{satisfaction.rating_section}} into your notification. That’s it! Now your “solved” notification will include a customer satisfaction survey:
Customizing the customer satisfaction email
If you want to customize the Satisfaction Survey section of the email notification you can use system placeholders and HTML to do so. You'll find the list of available placeholders in the Zendesk Support placeholders reference.
For example, the default {{satisfaction.rating_section}} placeholder will return the following section:
If you use the {{satisfaction.positive_rating_url}} and {{satisfaction.negative_rating_url}} placeholders plus custom HTML you can transform the satisfaction section to something like this:
Considerations
When customizing your customer satisfaction process, you’ll want to think about different situations, and what will work best for both you and your customers.
Are you more concerned about customers receiving too many emails? Consider combining customer satisfaction with another email. However, customer satisfaction may not get the attention (or response) when combined with other information.
Also consider the case that a ticket is inadvertently marked as solved, or is solved before the issue is actually resolved for the customer. Sending out the survey in combination could actually result in more negative ratings. Using an automation instead allows a period of time to pass, during which a customer could choose to reopen his or her ticket.
If your response cycles with support are typically shorter (e.g. most tickets take 5 minutes to answer), you may want to actually reduce the amount of time you wait before surveying customers. If your response cycles are measured in hour or days, 24 hours might be adequate. Timing is everything, and a perfectly timed customer satisfaction survey can truly help your response rate.
For more in-depth instructions on configuring Customer Satisfaction, visit our forum article: Using customer satisfaction rating
60 Comments
Hi,
One of my customers has tried to respond to a survey email and reported that she is unable to do so if she takes longer than 24 hours to reply. She advised that the the survey has expired. Is there somewhere I can set the expire time on a survey? If not, do they really expire after only 24 hours?
Is it possible to must include replies and status of solved as opposed to just solved tickets? Occasionally people will solve tickets and not include a reply, the requester of these tickets should not get a survey.
@Aron, I can think of two ways of perhaps doing this. One i know works, the other will take some testing but would be neater if it works.Both assume you have a plan that allows you to customize business rules.
1) When an agent adds a comment to a ticket, use a trigger to add a tag to the ticket and then edit the automation that sends the csat to check that this tag is present.
2) I suspect the condition Hours since assignee update may be useful. You could test to see if this is less than 1 in your csat automation. This I have not tested.
Thanks Colin, I think I get this now. I created a trigger so if Agent replies is greater than 0, it adds a tag. I'll then add the tag to the Automation rule as a requirement for sending out the survey. I am not sure the second method would work for us because we have some assigning triggers which I think counts as an update.
Appreciate the help.
Just wanted to bump the feature request for 'send survey every X tickets'.
We're quite new to Zendesk and we're getting a lot of customers asking for CSAT surveys to be turned off because they're receiving too many. If we could limit this to every 5 or so tickets, I think they'd be more accepting.
Not sure if we'd want this limit based on the customer tickets or on the assignee. I.e. are we checking the customers' overall satisfaction, or their satisfaction with the specific agent?
Hey Paul!
You're definitely not the only person who has made this suggestion; there's actually an active thread about this in our Product Feedback forum that you can find here: Random Satisfaction Survey.
I'd encourage you to add your vote and use case to the conversation. This will ensure that our Product Managers see your thoughts. They take customer feedback seriously and consider it as they work to make Zendesk better.
Steve Jones above asked this question and I do not see a response. I too have received the same feedback from a customer.
Hey Jennifer,
Satisfaction survey links do have a few ways they can expire:
1.) The customer has already clicked the link. The link that is shared with an end-user can only be clicked on once. If they click on it and rate the ticket, it will expire. If they click on it and don’t rate the ticket, it will expire. If someone else (perhaps an admin or an agent) received the same link and clicked on it, the token will expire.
2.) The link itself has expired. The survey link is valid for 72 hours after being sent out. If they attempt to access this link after that period, they'll see an error.
3.) The ticket has been closed at the time the customer attempted to rate. Closed tickets cannot be rated since ticket properties cannot be changed on them.
Unfortunately these expiration rules can not be altered. You can alter the automations of when the ticket closes and when the survey is sent out. However, they will still expire after 72 hours of being sent.
Hey @Jennifer and @Paul,
You can check us out on the Zendesk AppStore, but we provide a solution that will let you embed rating buttons directly into the email the support agent sends to close the ticket. (So this means your customers won't be bothered by any additional emails asking for ratings. They can choose to give feedback if they want, right from within the email the agent sends to wrap things up). Given the issues you outlined in your post, we thought it might be useful to know about this as it would help solve it.
It looks like this basically, and writes back to ZD ratings too:
We have a ton of ZD users doing this. you can read about it here if you want more detail.
Hope that helps.
Hey !
I've a quick question about the satisfaction form sent to the user. Is it possible to customize it and change its design ?
I didn't find it on my admin options unfortunately.
Cheers,
Giovanni
Hey Giovanni!
At this time, there is no way to customize the form whatsoever, though that would make a great feature request! Definitely make a post there with the idea!
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!
Hi,
When you click on the link to submit your rating it is only in English. Can that be changed?
Is it possible to have the survey in local language or is it only available in English.
I have a similar question as Gurunn above.
I would like to have the survey enabled in multiple languages. How could that be achieved?
Hi Ragnar and Gurunn!
The Customer Satisfaction survey is fully internationalized so the survey section should be translated to match the language in the requester's user profile. If no language is set, it will sent in your account's default language listed under Settings > Account > Localization.
You can customize the content of the email message beyond the rating section i.e. Good, I'm Satisfied/Bad, I'm Unsatisfied (this part is automatically translated) using dynamic content. See Providing multiple language support with dynamic content (Professional and Enterprise). In general, you'd create the translations of the email text for the survey in each language you'd like to support and then use the dynamic content placeholder in the body of the Satisfaction rating automation.
This would then send satisfaction ratings emails based on the user's language set in their user profile.
1: Create the dynamic content for each language
2. Copy the generated placeholder:
3. Replace the email message body content with the dynamic content placeholder
Are there any plans to add a CSAT survey to phone calls?
Hey Joel!
You should be able to set up your automations to send the CSAT survey out on Talk tickets, as long as the tickets in question have the caller's email address on them. Is that what you mean?
We don't usually ask for everyone's email over the phone. I was thinking of something like while they are on hold it could say "If you are willing to stay on the line after your call to answer a one-question survey, press 1."
Hey Joel!
Thanks for clarifying. It doesn't look like there are any plans to implement something like this right now. I did some poking around in our Product Feedback forum and wasn't able to find any posts about this, so I'd definitely recommend that you hop over there to share your suggestion.
In the absence of that functionality, you can probably make some tweaks to your phone call workflow. Here at Zendesk, I believe that we ask for that kind of information right off the bat when we receive a call. Another option would be to, at the end of a call, have your agents ask the caller if they'd be will to complete a short email survey. If the caller says yes, they can put the email address in the Talk ticket, and the CSAT can be sent out that way.
Thanks, Jessie. I posted that idea in the other forum. I have made my agents aware of the current system and we will implement. Good to know.
This is awesome.
Are we able to select which email address we want to send the survey to? If so, how can you do this?
For example, primary email address is the work email address. We would like to use this tool to conduct Exit Interview Surveys. This when an employee is leaving. The survey would be sent when the are no longer an active employee.
Hey Renee!
The email is always going to be sent out to the user's primary email address - the secondary email address is used only for identifying the user.
My suggestion would be, as part of the process for terminating an employee, to make their personal email address the primary email in their user profile prior to any related ticket being created for them. This will ensure that the survey gets sent to the right place.
Hello. We are looking to customize the URL link that the customer clicks on. There is no branding or anything on these links that represents our brand. How do we customize this?
Hi Renee!
Can you be more specific about which links you're referring to?
The link that leads you to this page...we need to customize this page.
Hey @Renee,
I represent Customer Thermometer and wanted to offer some advice. You can check us out on the Zendesk AppStore but our integration with Zendesk allows a one-click feedback survey to be embedded directly in the Zendesk triggers and automations, and with Customer Thermometer you can customise the landing page. It’s possible to add your own logo/images/social sharing icons, and select a background colour - so this can really help to bring the right look and feel to the landing pages. Plus you can customise the text according to what response they picked
We have a ton of ZD users doing this. You can read about it here if you want more detail.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for specifying, Renee!
While it's not possible to customize the sat survey landing page, you can most definitely customize the look and feel of the sat survey email that gets sent out to your customers. You can find one great example here.
Hello. I am new to using ZD. I've been reading and think I know the answer but wanted to confirm. My boss has asked if we can add more reply options (not just happy or unhappy) to the ticket survey. Is it possible to customize the reply options on the survey? For example, text values Very Satisfied, Somewhat Satisfied, neutral,Somewhat Dissatisfied, etc. Thanks All!
Hey Jamie -
Welcome to the Zendesk Community!
Our CSAT surveys do not allow you to add more reply options, but there are several other ways you can do it.
Check out this tip on using SurveyMonkey to collect satisfaction ratings, and these apps that you can use for CSAT that integrate with Zendesk.
Is there a way through either Triggers or Automations to send the CSAT the next business day in the morning (at a specified time)? This will increase response rate rather than sending after a specified amount of hours/minutes from solve (which could be at 6PM Firday evening).
@Travis,
I was thinking about this and the best way to get close to what you're looking for would be to leverage the Due Date option on a ticket -- but that obviously means you have to use the Task Ticket.
If that is acceptable, you modify the CSAT trigger to send the CSAT when it sees a solved ticket with a specific tag, perhaps "7amcsat".
Set up an automation that adds the "7amcsat" tag with Ticket: Hours Until Due Date: (calendar) is 5. This equates to 7am since Due dates are assumed at 12noon.
Then the trigger will fire off and Bam. You're good to go!
Please remember: Automations are run hourly and not necessarily at the exact same moment or a predictable time each hour. With that in mind and a tiny bit of flexibility I believe you can achieve your goal here.
Please remember also: Check that you don't duplicate the CSAT by adding a tag after it has been sent if it doesn't already have this built in. This way it doesn't run multiple times on the same ticket.
Please sign in to leave a comment.