Question
I received a bad satisfaction survey response. When I followed up with the customer they said they never even opened the survey email or did not click a bad response. Why do we get 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 they aren't malicious. Since customer satisfaction (CSAT) ratings store the last rating link clicked, a script that clicks every link will register as 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
Create your own survey
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 the automation to edit.
- Scroll down to Perform these actions to locate the Email body section.
- Locate the
{{satisfaction.rating_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.
65 Comments
We've also seen a sudden influx of these in the past few weeks. When we reach out to clients on what we could do better, they have all said they didn't select the bad feedback. Looking at the Zendesk Events, all of them have come in on the hour or at half past - so seems like some kind of scheduled automation is doing this? I'll raise a ticket with Zendesk support, but sounds like we're not the only Zendesk customer having this issue.
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.
Scott Allison, maybe a naive question - but if a anti-virus software scanning is causing the trigger - doesn't it leave evidence in the http request header, like a specific user-agent, or other parameter that is not found in a human-generated traffic?
If so, can't you use these hints to filter out this activity?
Changing CSAT from good and bad to a link will solve the problem, but it will decrease the number of responses.
It is not an ideal solution.
I would select good in a survey but not click on a survey link where the survey could be from one to many questions...
Isn't there any option to add a hidden void button before the survey options so an antivirus would not check any of the options?
Tal Admon We did look at various pieces of meta data including the ones you mentioned but this wasn't a magic bullet. There was only one such piece of software that was actually identifying themselves with a unique user agent, others were just appearing like any other browser.
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