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
- In Admin Center, navigate to the Automations page
- Locate the Request customer satisfaction rating automation, and click on that automation to edit
- Scroll down to Perform these actions to locate the Email body section
- 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.
82 comments
Tiffany Zwolakowski
@ Jimmy
We put in two automations for a Bad or Bad with Comment Satisfaction score. The first emails our Agent alerting us of the bad score, so we can reach out and attempt to remedy it.
Then, a second Automation called "Bad Sat Score 2nd Chance". It sends the user an email 72 hours after solved saying 'we're sorry we disappointed them' and asking if we've since solved the problem and if so, would they consider giving updating the score. It then includes the rating button so they can update it.
It's not perfect and doesn't solve the issue, but at least we know when it happens and the requester has the chance to update the score before it's solidified.
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Shelly Gurrola
Is there a way to set the default auto-response if virus protector opens the csat request, to choose Satisfied instant of assuming the worse?
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Michael Mader
We are looking into adding "Satisfaction reasons" into our Zendesk instance. I'm curious if anyone has live experience with this and if it would also select the top reason and give us, not only a false bad rating, but also a false reason. I understand we can customize this and leave a blank field at the top, but I'd rather not utilize one of those limited fields for that.
Thanks in advance!
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Mitchell Cole
@...
Hi all,
My team is now experiencing the false negative satisfaction ratings at the top of the hour discussed in this article. I have not seen a comment on this thread in 2 years, is there any update or resolution to this besides the same resolution (included below) that was posted several times already?
"
{{satisfaction.rating_section}}placeholder and replace it with{{satisfaction.rating_url}}"
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Zulq Iqbal
Hi Kyle
That's weird, I have not received a false positive since I've been running this method in over 2 years. Even for those running "on the hour" or "30mins".
This must be another issue.....
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Bill Habegger
Does anyone have a way to determine if there are also false "Good" ratings occurring?
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Dave Dyson
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Bill Habegger
As suggested in the article, I have looked at third-party vendors for our CSAT. Some seem very promising and offer additional value beyond the ZenDesk CSAT, however, I have to pay for that value. It would be my preference to continue using the built-in ZenDesk CSAT, but until they add some backend technology to reduce the number of false clicks, I can't justify using it.
That being said, all of the third-party vendors have to deal with the potential of False Clicks. Most of them use some sort of technology on the back end to determine if it is an automated click or a real person. They admit this helps significantly, but does not eliminate all false clicks, and at times may wrongly disregard some CSAT responses.
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Bill Habegger
For those experiencing this issue, is your CSAT survey email coming from support@mydomain.zendesk.com or do you have Zendesk setup to send directly using an email address from your domain such as support@mydomain.com?
I am still using support@mydomain.zendesk.com and am wondering if I would see fewer false clicks if I set up Zeneesk to use support@mydomain.com.
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Bill Habegger
I am also going through tickets manually to record the "true" ratings. One thing that has helped me is to send myself an email with every ticket that is rated "Bad" without comments. I include in it a link to the "events" view of the ticket. The CSAT survey is "offered" a minute or two after the top of an hour. If the bad review is received exactly on the next hour, I know it is a false click.
In addition, we changed the timing of the CSAT survey to be sent 10 hours after the ticket was solved. This pushed the bulk of our surveys into the overnight time period when our team members were not working. That also helped us have confidence in considering them fake results. Not likely for us to receive a CSAT survey at 4AM in the morning.
I am currently considering Simplesat, StreetHawk, and Customer Thermometer to handle our CSAT. Both Simplesat and Customer Thermometer indicated they have mechanisms in place to limit false clicks. Street Hawk did not, but indicated that they had not seen it happen on their surveys.
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Steven Major
It seems our template is different and not sure how to apply the workaround: This is our template:
Hello {{ticket.requester.name}},
We'd love to hear what you think of our customer service on this ticket. Please take a moment to answer one simple question by clicking either link below:
{{satisfaction.rating_section}}
Here's a reminder of what this request was about:
{{ticket.comments_formatted}}
What do I need to change or is this format just bad overall? We're seeing this issue on a regular basis as well.
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Steven Major
Also, has anyone had issues where the links are expiring after a period of time?
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Nikki
I'm assuming that {{satisfaction.rating_url}} works in both triggers and automations... but for some reason it's not offered as a placeholder in triggers - only in automations. Let me know if my assumption is wrong. Going to try switching to this. Our volume is very low, which means every single rating has a big impact - so false negatives are a major problem. Of course, switching to {{satisfaction.rating_url}} also means that the number of people who actually leave ratings will probably drop. That's a bummer.
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Andrew Chu
we are facing the same issue and if Zendesk does not fix this soon it's a huge loss for them
0
Ola Timpson
This is a huge pain point for us, but I can also see it's not a simple one for Zendesk to solve. What we're asking them for is a webpage that behaves differently if accessed by an email scanner than if accessed by a person. Except if that was easy to achieve then every dodgy website would just present themselves as safe to scanners.
We look into all our 'bad' ratings anyway, but if there is no comment, the ticket looks fine, and the rating is approx 1 hour after survey send then we approach the customer differently.
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Puneet Misra
Zendesk It does not seem like there is any priority to fix this issue. Can you consider allowing admins or end-users to remove ratings? Good and Bad? This can help us use some of the workarounds. Or maybe you can consider making it a requirement to add a comment to a bad rating so that way it's not accepted without comment. Do you have an intake process for feedback?
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Bill Habegger
I almost hate to say this, but I have seen a dramatic drop in False Negatives. I had over 50 in March and only have 3 so far in April. Has anyone else experienced a change? I am trying to decide if something changed with Zendesk or it was something on our side?
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David Brown
It was still happening for my instance through yesterday as I had both customers and agents reporting it, but now I have deployed the fix removing the rating on click and just providing a hyperlink to the survey site. I tested for bot clicks in my sandbox with this setup and had no bot clicks in >100 opportunities. I'm hopeful that this is resolved with this new CSAT method, however I would still not trust the original CSAT survey.
0
Pablo Kenney
Hi folks,
My name is Pablo Kenney, and I'm a vice president of product here at Zendesk. I wanted to take a moment to jump into this thread and lay out a few responses on this issue.
First, the relative lack of response on this thread is not an indication of our lack of interest in the issue. We are aware of this issue, and appreciate the difficulty of the situation for those experiencing this problem. If you hop over to the Support Topic, you'll see that we have been engaging on this topic over there.
Here's what I can tell you:
1) We have not changed how CSAT operates in any way that would lead to the issues mentioned in this thread. Instead, as mentioned above, what is likely happening in these instances is the end-user has a link expander, like an anti-virus checker, installed on their machine or running on their mail server.
2) We have seen that a set of customers have received false CSAT scores over time, increasing in the October-December 2021 period. This is likely tied to a change in link-expansion behavior, but we have not tied it to a specific service or set of services. Obviously, the impact is significant for those who are experiencing the issue, but it is not widespread and does not seem related to how the Zendesk product behaves.
3) We’ve thoroughly investigated this issue, and we continue to recommend the suggestions in the article listed above. The suggestions in that article will resolve this for anyone experiencing the issue.
4) We have been thinking about how to improve CSAT functionality (including avoiding issues like this one) and look forward to delivering those improvements in the future. Those investments remain in the planning stage.
Note: In the interest of keeping related conversations in the same space, product managers primarily respond to product feedback in the feedback topic threads, so while we will continue to allow comments on this article for questions, if you wish to provide feedback on this issue, please do so in the Support Feedback Topic.
A special thanks to those who have provided their knowhow to help others implement the workarounds from the article.
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Jimmy Rufo
Hi Pablo Kenney,
Can your PMs or moderators be more proactive at redirecting users towards posts/channels where PM is actively reviewing? Doesn't seem like that happened here, but thanks for letting us know of the alternative page to follow.
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Rusty Wilson
Thank you so much @...
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Scott Allison
Scott Patterson I'm one of the Product team here at Zendesk. I just wanted to respond and clarify that it's not a scheduled automation causing this. There is a scheduled automation running to send CSAT surveys out once an hour, but what's happening is some portion of these are likely being scanned by anti-virus software running on the recipient's mail server. The guidance in this article should be followed as to how you mitigate or prevent this from happening completely.
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