About CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) ratings in Zendesk Support

Your customers can provide feedback about their experience in Zendesk Support by rating their solved tickets. When you enable CSAT (customer satisfaction) ratings in Zendesk Support, end users receive a notification 24 hours after the ticket has been set to solved that asks them to briefly evaluate their experience, as shown here:

The survey is designed to maximize the response rate by being quick and simple while also gathering the essential data: a positive or negative rating. Customers can also provide a comment if they want.

Enabling CSAT in Zendesk Support also enables it for messaging. See About CSAT ratings in messaging.

This article contains the following sections:

• Understanding the CSAT end user experience
• Understanding how the CSAT survey request is sent
• Understanding how agents receive the satisfaction rating feedback

Related articles:

• Enabling and using CSAT
• About CSAT ratings in messaging

Understanding the CSAT end user experience

End users don't have to be logged in to rate their tickets. When an end user receives a CSAT survey request via email, they can rate the support interaction directly from the email message; they do not need to be logged in. Clicking a response link in the survey email saves the end user's rating and opens the ticket with a prompt to add a comment about the rating if they'd like.

The end user’s initial rating submitted via the email link is saved for up to one hour as their “intention.” This delay gives users the chance to review their ticket and write a comment about their rating.

If users:

• Do not submit further information within one hour, their intention is recorded as their rating after the one hour period has lapsed. In this scenario, there is up to a one-hour delay between the time the user clicks the rating in the email and the time in which the rating is recorded.

• Add further information about their rating to the ticket, their rating and comment are recorded as soon as they submit the ticket.

In this example, the end user clicked the 'Good, I'm satisfied' link so the Good button is shaded blue to indicate that it is the selected rating. A comment can be added and the rating can be changed.

If you have satisfaction reasons enabled, end users who select 'Bad, I'm unsatisfied' are presented with a drop-down menu of possible reasons for their negative response.

Selecting a response is optional, and can be skipped. For information, see Working with satisfaction reasons.

If an end user does login to your help center, they can rate their tickets there as well. In help center, the rating prompt is only available on tickets for which the Ticket Satisfaction is set to Offered by an automation or trigger (see Understanding how the CSAT survey request is sent). Ratings submitted via the help center are recorded immediately.

End users can change their rating by clicking the emailed link again or by accessing the ticket through the My activities page in help center, then resubmitting their response. Ratings can be changed until the ticket is closed. See Tracking your support requests for information on viewing your tickets in help center.

Tip: Dylan Dimico shares some tips and tricks on changing your bad satisfaction ratings to good. Check it out in Changing bad satisfaction ratings to good.

The following rules apply to end users when using satisfaction rating:

• End users can't opt out of receiving survey requests.
• Satisfaction rating is per ticket, not per customer. End users receive a survey request for each of their tickets that are solved.
• Once a ticket is set to "Closed" status, the temporary URL will no longer work. It will re-direct the user to a generic page.

When and how end users are asked for a satisfaction rating through email is customizable. You can set a time other than the default 24 hours later to send the email. You can also add the survey request in the email that customers receive when an agent marks a ticket as solved instead. You can also use business rules to be more selective about (include or exclude) which tickets generate the survey request. If you send a satisfaction survey before the ticket is solved, end users need to sign in to access it.

Understanding how the CSAT survey request is sent

When you enable customer satisfaction rating (see Enabling CSAT), a system-generated automation called Request customer satisfaction rating is added to Zendesk Support. This automation sends the survey email to the ticket requester 24 hours after the ticket is solved. You can of course customize this.

The email body in the automation uses a placeholder called {{satisfaction.rating_section}} to insert the survey question into the message, as shown here:

Hello {{ticket.requester.name}},

We'd love to hear what you think of our customer service. Please take a moment to answer one simple question below:

{{satisfaction.rating_section}}

Here's a reminder of what your ticket was about: {{ticket.comments_formatted}}

When customers receive the email, they simply click either the Good or Bad links and follow the steps described above.

For more information about this automation, see About the Request Customer Satisfaction Rating automation.

Note: As noted above, the survey is sent when the ticket is set to Solved. It's possible to use a different status in the automation, such as Pending, but the ticket would have had to be set to Solved at least once before.

Understanding how agents receive the customer satisfaction rating feedback

The results of customer satisfaction surveys for agents are shown in the agent's dashboard and in a view called Rated tickets from the last 7 days.

Agents see, in their dashboard (when they click the Home icon () in the sidebar), the number of good and bad tickets for this week. They also see the overall satisfaction rating for the agent and all agents in Zendesk Support over the last 60 days (including the current day).

The calculation of the overall satisfaction rating uses the following simple formula:

This means that the score is an average of the total positive ratings from the past 60 days. An agent with a score of 90% means that over the past 60 days, 90% of the ratings they received were positive.

Agents, groups, and the account all have scores. The overall account score (in the example above, 95%) is the average for all agents in Zendesk Support. The two ratings provide feedback about individual performance and the average performance of all agents.

Note: An overall rating score will not be shown until 30 tickets are rated. This applies at the agent, group, and account levels. This means that an agent needs 30 ratings, a group (all agents within the group) needs 30 ratings, and the account (all the agents in your Zendesk account) needs 30 ratings.

The view (Rated tickets from the last 7 days) gives you a quick overview of the rating activity, with a Satisfaction column containing both Good and Bad ratings. You can clone and modify this view or create your own. This view is inactivate by default.

The following rules apply to agents when using customer satisfaction rating:

• Agents cannot rate tickets.
• All agents see their ratings in their dashboard. This feature is enabled at the account level and applies to all agents in your Zendesk account. You can't exclude individual agents from receiving ratings on the tickets they are assigned to.

Additionally, ratings cannot be moderated. All ratings are shown.