Customizing your customer satisfaction survey

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:

1. In Admin Center, click the People icon () in the sidebar, then select Configuration > End users.
2. Click the Satisfaction tab. 

When you enable customer satisfaction, a pre-built automation is automatically created for you. To see this automation:

1. In Admin Center, click the Objects and rules icon () in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Automations.
2. 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: 

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.

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.