Customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating surveys allow you to measure how happy your customers are with the services you provide. Inevitably, you're going to receive a less-than-glowing response (rare as it may be). You can learn about the issues behind a bad satisfaction rating by asking any customer who gives a negative survey response to select a reason for their dissatisfaction.
This article contains the following sections:
For more information on customer satisfaction ratings, see Using customer satisfaction ratings.
Enabling satisfaction reasons
Satisfaction reasons are managed through the Customers settings.
To enable satisfaction reasons
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Settings > Customers.
- On the End-users (customers) settings page, click the Satisfaction tab.
- In the Configuration Options section, click the checkbox to enable Ask a follow-up question after a bad rating. This opens the satisfaction reasons picklist.
- Click Save Tab to accept the default reasons:
- The issue took too long to resolve
- The issue was not resolved
- The agent's knowledge is unsatisfactory
- The agent's attitude is unsatisfactory
You can accept these reasons, or create customized reasons. See Customizing satisfaction reasons for information.
Once enabled, customers who respond to your survey by selecting "Bad, I'm unsatisfied" see a follow-up question that asks "What is the main reason you are unsatisfied?", with a drop-down menu to choose their reason:
This follow-up question is optional - customers can skip it by simply ignoring it and clicking Update - and it only appears to customers who select the response "Bad, I'm unsatisfied".
Customizing and localizing satisfaction reasons
The default reasons address common, service-related issues customers may have, but these may not serve your needs. When you enable satisfaction reasons, you can customize the reasons offered to your customers to better reflect brand and product-specific language, unique customer experiences, and even cultural differences. You can also localize your custom reasons to reach customers in multiple languages.
Customizing the reasons list
There are any number of reasons why you may want to customize the reasons offered to your customers. Maybe you want to clarify whether a customer's dissatisfaction is with a product rather than the service they received, focus on different aspects of your customer service, or simply change the reasons' language to match your company's style.
You can add an additional reason to the default list (up to five reasons are allowed), and remove the default reasons to make room for your custom reasons. However, the default Some other reason cannot be removed from the list.
To add a reason to the list
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Settings > Customers and click the Satisfaction tab.
- Click the "+" button in the right-hand column and enter text for a new, custom reason.
- Click Enter or click away from the text field to add the new reason to the Reasons not in use column. Reasons in this column do not appear in the customer survey follow-up question.
- Next, move the reason to the Reasons in use column, so it is included as an option in the survey follow-up question.
- Click Save tab. Your new reason is now included as an option in your survey.
While default reasons cannot be deleted, you can move them (as well as any custom reasons) into the Reasons not in use column, to make room for more custom reasons, or just to remove them from the reasons list.
To remove a reason
- Click and hold the reason in the Reasons in use column you want to remove.
- Drag the reason into the Reasons not in use column.
- Click Save tab. The reason is removed from the survey.
To edit a reason
- Drag the reason you want to edit into the Reasons not in use column.
- Hover the cursor on the right side of the reason you want to edit. When the cursor symbol changes to a hand, click the reason.
- Edit the reason text as you need. When you are finished, press enter.
- Click Save tab.
Localizing custom reasons
You can customize your satisfaction reasons to appear in each of your customer languages, by integrating your reasons with dynamic content (available on Professional and Enterprise plans).
To localize a reason
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Manage > Dynamic Content.
- Click add item to add a new dynamic content item.
- Add a new title for your dynamic content item, select your default language, and enter the translation for this language.
- Click Create to create the new dynamic content item.
- Click add variant to add a new translation for your dynamic content item.
- Select a language for your item and enter the new translation.
- Click Create to save the new translation. In this example, the satisfaction reason is localized in English and Spanish and has a new dynamic content placeholder, {{dc.sat_reason_product_issue}}
- Navigate back to Settings > Customers > Satisfaction.
- Click the "+" button to add a new satisfaction reason.
- Insert your new dynamic content placeholder into the text field and type "Enter" or click away from the text field. The placeholder gets resolved to the language of the account when saved to make the satisfaction reasons easier to manage.
If available, the translated satisfaction reason will appear in the correct customer language.
Using satisfaction reasons in reporting
If you're using Zendesk Explore Lite, Professional, or Enterprise, the Satisfaction tab of the Zendesk Support dashboard gives you a wealth of information about your CSAT.
- Reporting on CSAT and one-touch tickets
- Finding tickets with no replies
- Determine ticket assignee when satisfaction rating is given
- Reporting on customer satisfaction by agent
- Percentage satisfaction score based on agent replies
- Satisfaction trending year-over-year
- Replicating the Satisfaction tab reports in Explore
For information on working with Explore, see Getting started with Zendesk Explore.
Applying satisfaction reasons to ticket views
You can create a ticket view to organize tickets by the satisfaction reason given, or to look tickets with a negative response and no satisfaction reason given.
The reasons included in your survey appear as condition elements in the views builder:

For information on building ticket views, see Using views to manage ticket workflow.
Applying satisfaction reasons to business rules
You can create business rules - triggers and automations - based on satisfaction reasons to draw attention to tickets with certain responses.
The reasons included in your survey appear as conditions in the triggers or automations builder:
For more information on triggers and automations, see the following articles:
30 Comments
Satisfaction Reason is showing as a column option in our View builder, but when I select it, it doesn't work. Is this a known thing, or should we be raising a support ticket?
Hey Terry! Can you specify what's going wrong? Are you not able to select it, or do you select it and when you save it doesn't show up in your view?
Hi Jessie,
It was the latter, but it seems to have resolved itself now. Am now able to select it as a column and group by it in Views.
Thanks anyway.
Good! Let us know if you run into any more problems.
Hey!
I just want to build the exact stacked graph showing in the article. Can someone screenshot the settings/metrics please, so I don't have to reinvent the wheel?
Thanks!
Hey Nienke -
I don't have access to the reporting that the documentation people mocked up to get that screen shot, but you could check out Creating reports and dashboards in Insights for some help. Hopefully one of the other community members has built this report before and can help you out!
I'd like to confirm if the standard reasons are automatically translated or if we need to recreate them as custom reasons with dynamic content.
Hi Monica,
The placeholder satisfaction.rating_section already detects the language of the requester so the reasons should also display based on the language that's set in their profile.
Let us know if you run into any issues with your satisfaction reasons not displaying in the correct language and we can dig into that further :)
Hi , this is important. Can we make the reason as a must-do option ? I mean we want to get a reason for each bad tickets. Now there are over 50% bad ratings are with no reason provided, that will affect our analysis a lot
Hey Linda-Sl,
Since this feature is not readily available, I would recommend creating a separate post in Support Product Feedback forum to provide visibility to the appropriate Product Managers.
This also helps to gauge interest from other users in need of similar functionality.
In the meantime, what you could do is create a Trigger that sends an email response to the requester any time a ticket is updated with a Bad Satisfaction.
Let me know if you need assistance setting up this Trigger.
Cheers!
Hi there,
Is there any placeholder (something like satisfaction.reason) that can help us gathering the survey reason in a ticket comment?
I'm currently using a macro to add an internal comment when a ticket has a bad rating. I can grab the satisfaction result and the comments, but not the reason.
Any trick to share? Thanks!
Hey Thomas,
There's no satisfaction reason placeholder at this time, however, I was able t track down the following feedback request that you can upvote and provide you use-case for: Need a placeholder for satisfaction reason
I'll be sure to pass your feedback along to the appropriate team as well :)
Cheers!
Hi Brett,
Thanks for the confirmation and for pointing me to this feedback request that I've just +1'ed.
Fingers crossed! ;-)
Is there are way to delete reasons that are not in use?
Hey Florian,
When navigating to Admin>Settings>Customers>Satisfaction you should be able to drag and drop the reason to the Reasons not in use column so it's no longer being used.
Let me know if this isn't what you're looking for as I'm happy to assist further.
Cheers!
Hey Brett,
Thanks for your answer.
I would like to delete the reason from "reasons not in use".
I would like to have the "reasons not in use" empty.
Hey Florian,
As it turns out, there's no way to delete the satisfaction reasons at this time. I can see why this would be a useful feature so I'll be sure to pass this feedback along to our Product Managers.
Appreciate you bringing this to our attention!
Hi there,
When someone chooses "Bad, I'm unsatisfied", how can we make the comment section mandatory for the rating to be submitted? We've experienced that in our line of business, literally no one leaves a reason for a negative rating, and those ratings don't make much sense of you look at the actual tickets, effectively making this feature useless for us.
Glad if you could help.
Alexander
Hey Alexander,
There's no way to make the satisfaction reason mandatory at this time. What you could do is create a trigger that sends a follow-up email to the user if the ticket is rated bad without a comment. You can use the following conditions:
Meets all of the following
* Ticket>is>Updated
* Satisfaction > is > Bad
* Satisfaction > is not > Bad with Comment
Actions
Email user > (requester)
I hope this helps!
Hi Brett,
Thank you for sharing your knowledge about this feature. I just activated the CSAT and I noticed that there are reasons for "Bad" satisfaction and I can change or customize these reasons in Settings, however, I noticed that "Good" satisfaction do not have reasons which I think could be very helpful to get feed back from customers on what was the reason they were satisfied with our service. This will also be helpful in KPI reports as well.
I did not find a way to implement reasons for "Good" satisfaction. Is there a way to get this added in the system?
Thanks,
Feras
Hey Feras,
There's no option for Good Satisfaction Reason at this time. The user would be able to leave a Good Satisfaction with a comment if they wish to do so. I'm happy to pass this feedback along to the appropriate team so they're aware of this need.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
HI,
Is there any possibility to remove satisfaction reason from "Reasons not in use" column? I`ve got too much there.
Thanks for your help,
Arek
Hello Arkadiusz Szafraniec,
You can accomplish this is by changing your Admin setting in the sidebar, then select Settings > Customers and click the Satisfaction tab. From there, you'll just need to make the following change I've highlighted below.
Best regards.
Any plans on allowing the ability to configure more than 5 reasons?
Hello Reshma Patel,
I understand you would like to add more than 5 reasons, but at this stage, there are no plans to add more than that yet.
I would recommend reaching out to our Feedback on Support forums and suggesting this change so our devs can consider implementing it in a potential future update.
Ya configuré mis razones y las guardé pero al pobar en un chat real calificandolo mal, no me aparecen, solo veo el campo para ingresar comentario
--
English translation added by the Zendesk Community Team via Google Translate:
"I have already configured my reasons and saved them but when I tried in a real chat, rating it wrong, they do not appear, I only see the field to enter a comment"
Hi Esmeralda,
The satisfaction reasons will work on any email surveys sent via Zendesk Support, they are not a part of the chat ratings. We have more details on chat ratings in Measuring visitor satisfaction with chat rating.
I am in the process of determining whether to turn on reasons for our CSAT. There is a concern internally about all agents being able to view all other agents' dissatisfaction reasons. Is there any way to limit reasons visibility only to admins, or anything like that?
Hey Katy,
I double checked on my end and we currently do not have a way to restrict agents/staff from accessing tickets with a satisfaction rating nor hide a ticket's hide the satisfaction rating.
The only restriction currently would be to remove agents access to ticket outside their group which can be configured on their profile page if you don't have custom roles on your account.
Let me know if you have any other questions for me!
I have repeatedly deleted one of the reasons being used, and saved it here successfully, but it will appear again after an hour. This is why
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