Why am I receiving unexpected bad satisfaction ratings?

Question

I received a bad satisfaction survey response. When I followed up with the customer, they confirmed that they never opened the survey or didn't give a bad rating. Why are we receiving false bad ratings?

Answer

Your customers likely have link expanders installed on their computers or running on their mail servers. These programs open links in the email to verify that they aren't malicious. Since customer satisfaction (CSAT) ratings store the last rating link clicked, a script that clicks every link will register a bad satisfaction response.

Enabling DKIM and SPF records helps ensure that links are not scanned. These email authentication protocols decrease the likelihood that the link expanders will flag emails from your Zendesk account for inspection.

If you have set up SPF and DKIM and are still seeing issues, there are two workflow options to resolve the issue:

• Modify your survey automation to not include direct response links
• Create your own satisfaction survey and use the Satisfaction Rating Endpoint

Modify your survey automation to not include direct response links

By default, the Request customer satisfaction rating (system automation) includes a block with both the good and bad response links. Switch this out for a placeholder that contains a link to a separate page with these options instead.

To modify your survey

1. In Admin Center, navigate to the Automations page
2. Locate the Request customer satisfaction rating automation, and click on that automation to edit
3. Scroll down to Perform these actions to locate the Email body section
4. Locate the {{satisfaction.survey_section}} placeholder and replace it with {{satisfaction.rating_url}}
   

For more information on placeholders available in Zendesk Support, see the article: Zendesk Support placeholders reference.

Create your own satisfaction survey and use the Satisfaction Rating Endpoint

If you are comfortable with writing custom code, you can make your own survey and use the Satisfaction Rating endpoint to feed the results into your Zendesk. This will ensure that you can still use Zendesk reporting on the CSAT survey. With a custom survey, you can add a verification step to thwart the link expanders.