One of Zendesk Support’s most popular features is our built-in customer satisfaction survey. Customer satisfaction allows you to track how well your agents and customer service organization as a whole are performing on a ticket by ticket basis. Because of our simplified approach, on average our customers see a roughly 21% response rate - which is fantastic! Zendesk Support provides some great defaults for the survey, but we get a lot of questions about how to further customize the customer satisfaction experience. Here are some tips to help you make the most of your customer satisfaction survey.
Enabling the customer satisfaction feature
To enable customer satisfaction surveys:
- In Admin Center, click the People icon () in the sidebar, then select Configuration > End users.
- Click the Satisfaction tab.
When you enable customer satisfaction, a pre-built automation is automatically created for you. To see this automation:
- In Admin Center, click the Objects and rules icon () in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Automations.
- Open Request customer satisfaction rating (System Automation).
It’s set up by default to send a customer satisfaction survey to your customers 24 hours after their ticket has been solved (not closed). We’ve found that this setup works really well for most companies that have a longer response cycle.
The default conditions for the system customer satisfaction automation:
Customizing when and how the customer satisfaction is requested
But that’s not the end of the story... you can customize the customer satisfaction survey to meet your needs. Customer satisfaction is really nothing but a placeholder that you can use in any notification sent out by a trigger or automation. Yes, Zendesk Support provides you with a system automation specifically for customer satisfaction, but you can modify it, or even remove it altogether and trade it in for a trigger.
As I pointed out earlier, the automation is defaulted to 24 hours. However, you can easily increase or decrease the length of time between when the ticket is solved and when the survey is sent by editing the automation:
If you’re taking advantage of user and organization tagging, you may want to send customer satisfaction to only a subset of your user base. For example, do you want to make sure users tagged with “partner” never get a customer satisfaction survey? Add this condition under “ALL”:
Are you afraid that users are receiving too much email? Consider combining the “solved” email notification with the customer satisfaction survey. To achieve this, simply deactivate the customer satisfaction automation, then go into triggers and edit your “solved” notification trigger. Add the customer satisfaction placeholder {{satisfaction.rating_section}} into your notification. That’s it! Now your “solved” notification will include a customer satisfaction survey:
Customizing the customer satisfaction email
If you want to customize the Satisfaction Survey section of the email notification, you can use system placeholders and HTML to do so. You'll find the list of available placeholders in the Zendesk Support placeholders reference.
For example, the default {{satisfaction.rating_section}}
placeholder will return the following section:
If you use the {{satisfaction.positive_rating_url}}
and {{satisfaction.negative_rating_url}}
placeholders plus custom HTML, you can transform the satisfaction section to something like this:
Considerations
When customizing your customer satisfaction process, you’ll want to think about different situations, and what will work best for both you and your customers.
Are you more concerned about customers receiving too many emails? Consider combining customer satisfaction with another email. However, customer satisfaction may not get the attention (or response) when combined with other information.
Also consider the case that a ticket is inadvertently marked as solved, or is solved before the issue is actually resolved for the customer. Sending out the survey in combination could actually result in more negative ratings. Using an automation instead allows a period of time to pass, during which a customer could choose to reopen his or her ticket.
If your response cycles with support are typically shorter (e.g. most tickets take 5 minutes to answer), you may want to actually reduce the amount of time you wait before surveying customers. If your response cycles are measured in hour or days, 24 hours might be adequate. Timing is everything, and a perfectly timed customer satisfaction survey can truly help your response rate.
For more in-depth instructions on configuring Customer Satisfaction, see Using CSAT.
98 Comments
Hello, community! If you're interested in expanding your survey creation capabilities, you can try NPS and Survey app for Zendesk! The application automatically inserts placeholders and offers four survey types instead of "Good"/ "Bad".
Hello,
In addition to using automation for the survey, is there a way to also provide a link in an article for customers to complete the survey on demand versus an automated email?
Hello!
I’d need to update the verbiage going out for our CSAT Surveys. I’d like it to have 4 questions.
1. How satisfied are you with your online shopping experience with ?
2. How satisfied are you with the product you received?
3. Did the Customer Service Agent make it easy for you to resolve your customer service issue?
4. How likely are you to shop with again or recommend us to friends/family?
Did anyone ever find a marketplace app that allows setting intervals for csat surveys?
I have clients that write in quite often and we are pinging them too much for csat survey which is skewing our results.
There are two placeholders that you can use that were mentioned in this article. They are,
{{satisfaction.positive_rating_url}}
and{{satisfaction.negative_rating_url}}
You can use the two placeholders plus your own custom HTML to create multiple questions.
Thank you!
Kind regards,
We aren't able to get Satisfaction Reason values to display in any of our agent workspace views. We thought it may be due to the fact that the out of box Reasons are too long to display, so we shortened the Reason field values, but no still luck. Is this a known issue?
Is there a way to categorize the survey responses? It's great to understand if a client was satisfied, but also understanding what drove that (dis)satisfaction would allow us to understand what is working particularly well or what we need to address?
We call every client who submits a negative survey to determine what happened, express that we hear them, etc. I would love to be able to add a field to that completed survey that would then ascribe that dissatisfaction to a product shortcoming, a need for further training of the team, etc.
Thanks!
Hello!
When I send satisfaction surway to a customer and he clicks on Good or Bad option, what happens next? Is there a place to leave a comment? Does ti require to log in for a customer?
We are not yet using CSAT.
Thanks.
/Rita
I'm curious how others handle sending surveys out for unresolved bugs that may never get fixed. We don't want to keep bug tickets on hold while we wait for a fix that may never come, but to the customer, receiving a satisfaction survey for a bug ticket almost always results in 'bad'.
Hi Everyone,
I need urgent help with CSAT.
I have my own code of CSAT and I would like to implement that code to use my CSAT. I'm unable to find any option where I can put code and implement it. I put out code in the automation email body but getting error like "it should be less than 8192 bytes". I shorten my code but still getting the same error.
I asked multiple times to zendesk team about where I should put this code and how, If I'm doing something wrong, please point me in the right direction so that I can save my time.
You guys are proving an opportunity to customise CSAT but this way we can't implement anything.
If anyone can help me with this, will highlight appreciated it.
@... Along with the choices that Dave presented, Simplesat is another add-on option that allows you to set the follow-up question as required.
Thank you, Cory Brown
But i have complete source code. Can I put the complete code under the dynamic content placeholder and then use that code to replace CSAT.
I added a screenshot of how I added code. Please correct me if I'm doing anything wrong.
@... No, you don't need to create a new automation. Use the existing one you were trying to insert your CSAT survey in.
Replace your CSAT code with the dynamic content placeholder. Something like {{dc.csat_survey}}
@... thank you!
HI Jacob the Moderator, I am implementing the same thing. Can you please help me understand more on how you set this up please? Thank you.
@...
Up to you, but I'd start with around 60x60 px. 👍
Do anyone know the ideal dimensions for the emoticons? If we were going to use an image to rate satisfaction.
Thank you!
Is there a way to have the customer satisfaction rating included within a ticket when it is moved to solved?
Is there any way to block some emails from getting the automated customer satisfaction survey? I receive an automated email every week from a no-reply address and when it gets the satisfaction survey it rates it as bad.
Hi Yasmin, thanks for writing in! The placeholder is limited to what is listed here but in case you want to add more through custom HTML. You may need to reach out to your developers this time as we don't support custom coding. Alternatively, you can integrate your own CSAT tool through the API, or avail of our Professional Services. As they can build custom applications and other tools for your Zendesk when native functionality is not meeting your needs. Thank you!
We would like to have multiple questions for our survey. Is that possible in the built-in satisfaction survey?
Can you please multiple questions inside of the support email and would the customer have to click each link?
Or
Can we have all questions on one page for them to rate?
Thank you for reaching out to Zendesk Support.
In regards to your concern, the following can be done by custom HTML coding or CSS. However, Zendesk can't provide customer support for your custom HTML or CSS. Please post any issues you have in the comments section or try searching for a solution online.
Thank you!
Kind regards,
Thank you for reaching out to Zendesk Support.
In regards to your concern, first, you need to make sure that CSAT is enabled by going to the Admin > under Settings, go to Customers, and selecting the Satisfaction tab. Enable the Satisfaction rating option. Once enabled, you will be able to add the following Satisfaction condition in the ticket views creation.
Once you're on the ticket views creation page, make sure that the Satisfaction value is added under the Formatting options.
You can also check our article, How can I track satisfaction ratings with comments? for more information about this.
Kind regards,
Hi team. Hope you are good!
Hello team. My client wanted to include one more question within the current native search, something like:
Has your request been answered?
Yes
No
Is there any placeholder or code that can be applied or any other recommendations? Thanks in advance!
Hi folks,
Was hhoping someone could advise on the following.
When I add
{{satisfaction.rating_section}}
to the macro and apply it, it comes in the response in a shape of a link that takes to the Satisfaction survey.My question is - is it possible to imbed the survey itself into the email response where the customer could rate the service straight away as opposed to clicking/copying the CSAT link etc?
Just to make it look something like that:
Any advice would be very much appreciated.
Hi all.
I attempted to setup customer satisfaction surveys in a sandbox, but the automation never showed up. Does anyone had any advice?
Paul
also, would someone be able to share the HTML code for this CSAT survey:
Thanks for reaching out!
Customer satisfaction allows you to track how well your agents and customer service organization as a whole are performing on a ticket by Ticket basis only survey. Unfortunately, that might seem to be a Product feedback and not feasible as of the moment.
Hope that helps!
Currently, it is not possible to completely embed CSAT into an email, as on the backend, the CSAT ratings are added via an API call to our CSAT API. As API calls require a web-based call, users will need to navigate to a webpage external to the email so that we can receive a rating on the Zendesk side.
Hope this answers your inquiry. Thank you!
You can exclude users from getting CSAT by adding a tag to the user's profile and then adding a Ticket: Tags condition to your CSAT automation. Check this article for more details on this workflow: How can I exclude specific tickets, users, or groups from customer satisfaction surveys?
For surveys getting unexpected bad ratings, this usually occurs when a user has a link expander, like an anti-virus checker, installed on their machine or running on their mail server. These programs open links in the email to verify they are not malicious and since customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating stores the last rating link clicked, a script that clicks every link will register as a bad satisfaction response. More about this here: Why am I receiving unexpected bad satisfaction ratings?
Hope this helps!
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