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.
69 Comments
Try removing all spaces in the HTML, including line breaks. That has fixed the unwanted spacing issue for me in the past.
@... I can help!
Put your customized CSAT code in a dynamic content snippet. Then reference the dynamic content placeholder in your automation. Dynamic content doesn't have the same byte limit that triggers and automations do.
FWIW it does the same thing with the line breaks when using HTML in an email notification sent from a trigger as well. I was using a trigger to push out the CSAT survey while I was iterating.
It's annoying to have to copy/paste the code into a web app to "beautify" the code when making big updates but I can live with it now that I know what's going on with this. If ZD isn't going to address this quirk they should update the article above to mention this.
@...
This is the issue I am trying to do this and the article doesn't really have a section on how to have multiple questions.
How would one do that with your available placeholders?
@... this is probably a bug on the html editor on the automations page, it shouldn't be adding line breaks like it is.
I created a ticket for you so we can further troubleshoot your business rules. I'll look forward to your reply
Hi! I have customized reasons for the bad satisfaction ratings but I want them to be localized. How can I do it? I tried using placeholders from dynamic content but it automatically switches from placeholder to English. Any solution?
Cory Brown Thank you, that did the trick! I dunno if I ever would have thought of that. 🤦♂️
Also, for anyone in the future, I could be wrong but it seems like you can't apply CSS internally using <style> element in the <head> but rather can only apply inline CSS using <style> attribute inside HTML elements.
I could be wrong about that, I've gone through many iterations of this email while trying to solve for the spacing issue. It may be that only some of the internal CSS worked and some did not. I'm not an HTML/CSS expert (been a long time) but there do appear to be some unusual quirks to how CSS can be used in ZD emails.
Having some trouble with our custom CSAT HTML.
The code looks good from an HTML validator, but when we plug it into our CSAT automation, when it hits the customer's inbox, there are like 10 line breaks randomly added at the very top. Any ideas on how to combat that?
Hi Cushia,
I believe there is an app that lets you get more control over the interval that surveys are sent, however, I can't remember its name - you could browse the marketplace for it here.
About excluding specific requesters or tickets from getting a survey, you could add a condition to the CSAT automation, e.g. does not have tag "block_survey", this way you can add this tag on tickets where you don't want to send. If you add it on the requester, then any ticket they create will also have this tag, and they will not receive the survey.
Hope this helps you out.
Edit: Added a missing "not" to the last paragraph 😀
Cory Brown you are a hero!
Thanks Jacob, appreciated
Oh great! Glad you could get that sorted.
I’ve noticed that as well about CSS styling. Not all styles work. Really only the most basic ones do.
I’d be happy to take a deeper look at your html if you’d like. You can email me at cory@simplesat.io
Hi Team
I am looking to elaborate on the CSAT survey 2 have 2 questions. On occasion, the agent managing the case will provide great service however the customers issue is surrounding the company or the policy.
I would like to have 2 questions somewhat along the lines of:
1. Are you satisfied with the service provided by the case manager you were in contact with?
2. Are you satisfied by the outcome? OR Are you satisfied with the company?
Can anyone advise the best way to tackle this?
Thanks
Hello TN,
Just forwarding the previous comment from Becca a couple of years ago:
"The Customer Satisfaction survey is fully internationalized so the survey section should be translated to match the language in the requester's user profile. If no language is set, it will be sent in your account's default language listed under Settings > Account > Localization.
You can customize the content of the email message beyond the rating section i.e. Good, I'm Satisfied/Bad, I'm Unsatisfied (this part is automatically translated) using dynamic content. See Providing multiple language support with dynamic content (Professional and Enterprise). In general, you would create the translations of the email text for the survey in each language you'd like to support and then use the dynamic content placeholder in the body of the Satisfaction rating automation.
This would then send satisfaction ratings emails based on the user's language set in their user profile.
1: Create the dynamic content for each language
2. Copy the generated placeholder:
3. Replace the email message body content with the dynamic content placeholder
[end of the comment]".
Hope that helps!
Hi Felicia Reid,
Yes! Just add the placeholder into your Solved ticket trigger. I recommend turning off the automation if you do that so the customer doesn't get asked twice...unless you want it that way :D
placeholder {{satisfaction.rating_section}}
Hi Anna,
We just want to make sure that everything was followed here? The dynamic content placeholder will match the language in the requester's user profile and if the end-users language is a variant of a supported language, the content will default to English (US).
Hi Pablo,
Currently adding more questions along with the CSAT question is natively not available but just to get more context are you referring to adding one more question after giving each survey? Like after giving Good or Bad? While there is a native Satisfaction reasons if the customer will rate it as Bad. Or do you just want to add one more question just below the Good or Bad landing page?
Thank you!
IS there a way to ask additional questions that can be multiple choice? We want to capture the source they went to before we went live with our support portal?.
Thank you for raising this with the Zendesk Support Team.
We are unable to support assistance with custom HTML. However, if you want to send me your current HTML I can take a quick look and see if there is anything noticeable.
Hi there!
I need to add an "extra" quastion along with my csat question... its about resolution...I need to know if the matter of the contact was solved or not. What my be the "code" for doing this? can you help me please?
it does, thanks Gabriel
Hi Hesham,
Customer Satisfaction Survey is being sent via email only and it is technically not possible for Facebook or Twitter tickets to receive the survey email notification. It is also not possible for end-users to leave a satisfaction rating directly from Facebook or Twitter.
However, there are two alternatives that will allow the end-user to rate social media tickets:
1. Access Guide using their social media authentication, where they can rate their tickets from My Activities within Help Center.
2. Add the user's email address to the profile, so satisfaction surveys can be sent via email.
Check this article to learn more about Giving satisfaction rating via Facebook and Twitter
Hope this helps!
Hi,
I have more than one question about satisfaction survey:
1- Is satisfaction survey sent to email address only or sent through twitter or Facebook DM if ticket requester opened ticket through them?
2- If it sent through twitter or Facebook DM, is link of survey redirect the requester to another page or the requester can rate in same page of DM?
Thank you in advance,
Thankyou @... That worked really well.
In regards to your questions, you can have all the questions on one page/email for them to rate or answer.
Please check our article: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408886194202-Customizing-your-customer-satisfaction-survey for more information.
Thank you!
Kind regards,
It is possible to customize the text on the email notification using our system placeholders and a custom HTML.
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:Note: 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.
See Customizing the customer satisfaction email for more detailed information.
Bobby Koch @... Have you resolved this?
I'm having the same issue. I have valid HTML which renders properly when loaded as HTML file in a web browser. However, the email that is received by the customer has approximately 15 line breaks added at the top. When I put a line of text before the HTML I end up with 15 line breaks between that line of text and my HTML code.
This is very frustrating and until I can figure this out I will have to stick with the default CSAT survey email.
Hello! Is there a way to change the wording in clickable links - "Good, I'm satisfied" and "Bad, I'm unsatisfied" to "Great, I’m satisfied" and "I still need help" ??
If you're using a custom ticket field to identify these "bug" tickets or a tag then you could add the "tags > contains > none of the following> (tag name)" condition to your CSAT automation you have set up.
Same if you use a custom field to identify these bug related tickets.
Let me know if that's not what you're looking for!
They will be taken to a new page where they can leave a rating for the agent that handled the ticket. That comment will then show up directly within the ticket. I would recommend taking a look at this article: About CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) ratings in Zendesk Support
I hope this helps!
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