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, see Using CSAT.
62 Comments
@Heather
Thanks for the input! Does the ticket type NEED to be a task? Or will the due date field still be a trigger-able variable within an automation even though the ticket were to be a "Problem" type? The reason is because we typically do not use task tickets, generally deal with problems or questions.
The other option is to create a hidden date field and have a trigger set the date to the current date, which should also be assumed to the time of 12PM (I hope).
The only major flaw with this is that we provide worldwide support, so the automation would correlate to our local time-zone of 7AM, not the ticket submitter. There needs to be some functionality to have a trigger or automation based on the ticket submitter's local time-zone.
@Travis,
I just created a test field (Date field) and it doesn't seem the offer the same options as the Due Date field does in terms of "hours until Test Date" is not offered.
I then tested if the automation will fire on a Problem ticket that previously was a Task Ticket (so I could fill out the Date Due field). Nada :( I guess the Task Ticket would need to be the requirement.
Worldwide - Didn't think of that! I'm not sure how the automation works across time zones.
ALTERNATIVE: Thinking out loud here - What if you
A little more manual but it achieves the goal, no?
@Heather
It would work, but are trying to get away from manual tasks as much as possible. Need a scalable solution.
To add to the chorus here, Zendesk --- we need a way to customize the CSAT landing page, which is currently impossible. I don't know how many customers need to ask for it. Specifically, we need a way to obtain CSAT ratings, while being able to turn off the free-hand comment feedback, which can create additional work by customers using it to continue their requests (mentioned a few times here). I mean it's basic CSS to hide it - should be dirt simple if we were allowed access or you gave us the option. In my experience, your new feature developments seem to be more internally driven than actually customer driven (if my 3+ years with Zendesk are any indicator), which can be frustrating. Any help here would be much appreciated - thanks!
Hey Chris -
That's great feedback, and I think you should share it in the existing Product Feedback thread on customer satisfaction customization. The product managers will read it there; they will not likely see feedback over here in the Knowledge Base.
Hi @Chris
I represent Customer Thermometer, we're a 1 click visual survey tool that measures CSAT. I wanted to offer some advice as we have an integration with Zendesk and our tool will enable you to switch off the comment capture field and also customise your landing page by adding your logo, social media icons, images etc. You can also customise text according to response provided.
You can find us on the Zendesk AppStore as we have plenty of ZD users doing this. You can read about it here if you want more detail, it may help even if a temporary solution!
Best wishes,
Martha
It would be nice if the customer feedback survey was restricted based on the performance of ticket prioritisation.
For instance, I get a ticket from a user requesting a new mouse because there's is "sticky" but still works to a degree, it is not stopping them from doing their job. I prioritise the ticket to low priority. In the past I have used service now which sets out the days you need to complete prioritised tickets, for example a p1 which is the highest priority (an important server has gone down) needs to be fixed within one hour.
Back to our mice request which is set at low priority therefore we have 4 days to complete this.
Because the mice wasnt in stock the ticket will take longer than expected to fix, I get the mice in stock and replace the said mouse, however I get a bad feedback rating because "took too long" - however, because the prioritisation was set at low, I had 4 days to complete the ticket in which i did within that time, can it be restricted so the ticket feedback cannot be negative based on the time- I hope that makes sense.
I dont have sla's enabled, would this be implemented if I was to enable it?
Thanks
@Gareth,
That totally makes sense. As I understand it the current satisfaction rating functionality only allows good or bad and a Comment. There is no customization except for reason selection. And you ant customize on priority or SLA level.
I think your use case is amazing though. I hope a Zendesk Product Manager revisits CSAT aoon.
The "customizing the customer satisfaction email" section says "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:" but then right below it there is a note saying "Note: Zendesk does not support custom code and third-party technologies such as HTML or CSS."
So can we or can't we use CSS? If so, how? Can we replace any of the text in the {{satisfaction.rating_section}} placeholder, or edit any/all aspects of the placeholder?
Hi VK -
Apologies for the confusion. You can use CSS.
What we mean by "unsupported" in this case means that Zendesk will not provide the code, and if your custom code breaks something, we're not responsible for fixing it. Basically, you can do it, but our customer support team can't help you with it.
Thanks Nicole. Can I edit the default text that appears inside a placeholder? To add CSS, do I just wrap the placeholder code around HTML elements?
For example, in the article above, there is an image with a green GOOD button and a red BAD button; however when I use that same placeholder code it just appears as URL for me.
Hi VK!
You would need to use that URL in conjunction with custom HMTL to create the buttons, or insert images.
@Jessie, I'm also interested in the above. Linking hosted images is often blocked in Outlook, so I'm trying to figure out how you would embed an image in the Email Body response.
On top of this, the article says:
> Use placeholders plus custom HTML you can transform the satisfaction section to something like this:
But then goes on to say:
> Note: Zendesk does not support custom code and third-party technologies such as HTML or CSS.
So how can you uses custom HTML it you do not support it?
Hi Chris!
Custom code is supported in the sense that it's possible to use it. When we say that we don't support custom code, we mean that if you write any custom code and it breaks something or doesn't work we won't be able to help you fix it.
In other words, Zendesk software allows the use of custom code, but Zendesk support agents can't go through and debug the custom code for you.
I hope that clears things up for you! Let us know if you have any more questions.
@jessie, that's good clarification.
What about embedding images in the email body of a Trigger/Automation notification, which would eradicate the placeholder issues, and given the size of the images, would barely affect anything.
Hey Chris!
That would qualify as custom code, so I believe you can do it but if it doesn't work we can't help you fix it.
Hi
I am new to Zendesk so pardon me if topic has already been discussed.
I am wondering if there is an option in ZD (or any other addons) to create the following survey format.
1. Create a survey with 5 -10 questions as opposed to a single question
2. Multiple choices while answering the questions ( rating format 1 through 5) as against the binary Good or Bad options .
Thanks
I was wondering there if there are any plans to add customizability to the CSAT? We were for the option to have more response options available for our customers for example Good, Okay, Bad with additional questions that allow the customer to rate the interaction with the agent and separate questions for issue resolution and product?
Hi Michelle,
No plans in the immediate future. However, you may want to up-vote and follow this thread in the Support Product Feedback topic in the Community:
[More Satisfaction Survey Options](More Satisfaction Survey Options)
Is there a way to preview creative changes in conjunction with ZD placeholders, without having to go through the whole ticket solve process? If not, is that anywhere on the roadmap, or broader ability to customize the triggered survey email?
Hey Jimmy -
Some folks internally suggest that you build a test trigger to do this by adding a specific tag like 'csat_test' and have the CSAT actions carry through as they would on the automation just to test it out.
Hi! Thanks for this article, it is very helpful. I was wondering if there is a way to allow a member to change their satisfaction rating after they have answered it once. For example, I go to the 'rated tickets from past 7 days' and send a message to each of the members who rated the support as 'bad, I'm unsatisfied'. I reach out to ask if there is anything we can do to make sure they are satisfied with the support they received. If I answer their follow up questions and get them satisfied with the support, I want another follow up email to go out where they can change their rating of support. Does it automatically do that, or is there a way I can get it to do that?
-Kayleigh
Kayleigh
End users can re-evaluate their satisfaction rating as long as the ticket has not reached a closed status.
Similar to you, we review all bad ratings and reach out to the customer. Sometimes they have clicked Bad in error and sometimes the follow up resolves their concern enough that they will change their rating.
You can include the satisfaction offer again in the body of your ticket. It is easiest to do that with a macro and include the {{satisfaction.rating_section}} placeholder. Alternatively, you can ask the customer if they would like to change their mind and direct them with the {{satisfaction.rating_url}} placeholder.
The customer can also change their rating when viewing tickets in the Help Centre.
Awesome, that helps so much. Thank you!
One of the default filters on the survey automation that was on when we activated this was "Privacy = Ticket has public comments", which is great since we don't want the survey going to people that we didn't have interaction with. The problem we're having is that for some reason side conversations are being counted as public comments. We use side conversations to hand off non-support messages to other teams and then close. Is there some way to accommodate this flow without having to exclude all tickets that include side conversations (since we use this feature with legitimate support tickets, as well)?
Hi Amie -
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. This is not expected behavior; the engineering team is looking into it and we'll let you know when we hear something back from them.
We enabled the customer satisfaction featured but are unable to view any default automations under Business Rules > Automations
Should we go ahead and create our own automation?
Hey Raison,
If you don't see the automation on your end then yes you can certainly create your own easily enough. The following article shows how the default automation is set up: Using CSAT
Let me know if you run into issues as I'd be happy to assist further :)
Hi all,
Is it possible to have rating from 1-6 in the placeholder or is there only a yes/no placehonder?
Thank you! :)
Hi @Frida,
There's no current way to expand the CSAT rating natively. I have used Survey Monkey in the past and replaced the CSAT rating placeholder with one from them. The drawback was that people have to follow the link, resulting in lower percentage of reponses. The good part was when they did respond, we got richer data.
There are other options in the Marketplace it seems; I have no experience with them, but if you check the "Surveys & Feedback Category on the left, you can see quite a few pop up.
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