Improving satisfaction ratings

Customers have two ways to rate tickets. They can respond to the link in the customer satisfaction rating email or sign in to your Zendesk help center. In your help center, customers can access their recently-solved tickets and either set or change the rating if they feel that you have followed up on the issue to their satisfaction.

This article includes some tips and tricks on how to change bad satisfaction ratings to good. To learn how to enable customer satisfaction ratings, see Using CSAT (customer satisfaction ratings). 

This article contains the following sections:

• Accessing satisfaction ratings
• Addressing bad satisfaction ratings

Accessing satisfaction ratings

The first step to changing your bad customer satisfaction ratings is let your customers know how to make the change. There are two locations customers can set or change their satisfaction ratings:

• Satisfaction rating email link
•  My Activities page

Satisfaction rating email link

Most customers give their satisfaction ratings through the email link that is sent automatically when a ticket has been set to Solved. The link is valid until the ticket closes. Your customers do not have to be signed in to rate their tickets. Clicking a response link in the email opens a temporary URL to the ticket and prompts the customer to rate the ticket and add an optional comment. See example below:  

When the user clicks the temporary URL, it opens the ratings page. See example below:

 My Activities page

The most important component of allowing your customers to change their satisfaction ratings involves allowing them access to the My Activities page underneath their help center profile. For more information on the different ways you can allow customers to access Zendesk, see Configuring how end user access and sign in to Zendesk .

From within My Activities, your customer can change their satisfaction rating for any reason. It’s a great way to turn a Bad rating to Good, if you’ve provided additional follow-up to an issue. 

To navigate to My Activities

• Click your profile icon on the upper-right side of any help center page, then select My activities. 

 The customer can also add any follow-up comments as part of the ticket when they change their satisfaction rating as well.

Addressing bad satisfaction ratings

When you do receive bad satisfaction ratings, there are a couple of ways you can try to change the satisfaction rating to good. 

This section outlines the following methods:

• Creating a bad satisfaction trigger
• Responding to bad satisfaction ratings

Creating a bad satisfaction trigger

A few ways of dealing with bad satisfaction ratings includes sending a notification email to the agent, to specific follow-up customer service agents, to a group, or even to a Slack stream where it might be dealt with in a more company-wide manner. Zendesk allows you to make the decision on how these ratings are dealt with, using triggers. 

You can use the following trigger to notify a group of agents about a bad satisfaction rating: 

For Meet ANY of the following conditions, both Satisfaction > Changed to > Bad and Satisfaction > Changed to > Bad with comment are included. This ensures the trigger will fire upon receiving either rating. If you want to change who is notified about the rating, change the notification action. For more information, see About triggers and how they work. 

Responding to bad satisfaction ratings

One obstacle to overcome in changing your satisfaction ratings is to familiarize your customers with the sign-in process on your help center, if they aren’t already accustomed to it.

You might create a macro explaining how to do this, including instructions on how to receive a sign-in password. Below is an example draft:

Hi Customer,

We're very sorry that you were dissatisfied with the service we offered, though we're also quite relieved that we were able to find an adequate resolution for you. If you would like to change your satisfaction rating, you can sign in to your account at youraccount .zendesk.com and make the changes by going to My Activities, then selecting the ticket you'd like to update.

If you have never signed in to our Zendesk Support Help Center before, you can request a password by using the email address that we communicate with you through and clicking on the "Have you emailed us? Get a password" link at the bottom of youraccount .zendesk.com. You can follow this link to create a password.

Once you’ve created a password, you can then sign in and view your open tickets or your entire ticket history. The tickets that have been rated can be found in the My requests section of My Activities.

Let us know how you feel! We’re always happy to help.

In addition, you could add the placeholder {{satisfaction.rating_section}} along with triggers to send out the unique email satisfaction URL again either along with the macro or after a potential further update is made to the ticket. The {{satisfaction.rating_section}} placeholder retrieves a formatted block of text, prompting the customer to rate or change the satisfaction response. The text will differ depending on whether or not the customer has already provided a rating. For more information on placeholders, see Using placeholders. 

Another alternative you might consider is to send bad rating comments to an external target like Slack or Zendesk SMS. This is where the collective help of your entire team might be useful, so you can receive the input and assistance of many. For instructions on setting this up, see Notifying external targets .

There are a number of ways to get the word out and to focus your support energy. You can use just one or a combination of these strategies. With the ultimate goal being to offer the best support possible to your customers, you should open as many lines of communication between your customers and your support team as possible.