A customer satisfaction, or CSAT, survey encourages your customers to provide feedback about their support experience by rating their solved tickets. The survey is designed to maximize the response rate by being quick and simple while also gathering the essential data.
The CSAT survey for Zendesk Support is sent in email one day after the ticket is set to solved. For Zendesk web, mobile, and social messaging, the survey is presented in the messaging interface immediately after the ticket is set to solved.
- Tailor the CSAT question to your needs
- Select a rating scale with 1-2, 1-3, or 1-5 ranges
- Edit the label text for each rating
- Set the rating type as numerical, emoji, or custom text
- Show follow-up questions for users who submit negative ratings
Setting up the CSAT survey
By default, the CSAT survey is not active. You can tailor the survey with your CSAT question, rating scale, and rating labels, then choose the channels you'd like to send the survey. You must be an admin to set up and send the CSAT survey.
To set up and send the CSAT survey
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Customer satisfaction.
- Click Get started.
The page does not appear if you or another admin has already taken this step. If a banner at the top warns that you have legacy CSAT activated, click Go to end-user admin to deactivate legacy CSAT in the Satifaction tab before continuing.
- Click Edit survey.
- In the Rating scale section, configure the following:
- Headline: Text users see when asked to respond to the survey.
-
Scale range: Rating scale options that you want
users to select from:
-
1-2 rating scale, where 1 is bad and 2 is good (Use this scale if you want to send a simple survey with a good or bad rating.)
-
1-3 rating scale, where 1-2 is bad and 3 is good
-
1-5 rating scale, where 1-3 is bad and 4-5 is good
-
- Scale type: Response indicators that users will select when rating their experience, either numerical, emoji, or custom text.
-
Scale: Rating responses specific to the scale type. If your
scale type is:
- Numerical: The column displays numbers within the scale range.
- Emoji: You can select the emoji that corresponds to the rating.
- Custom text: You can type the text you want to display as the rating.
-
Label: For numerical or emoji scale types, this is the text
that identifies the rating.
- (Optional) If you want to send an open-ended question to users who submit a
negative rating, click to expand the Open-ended question section,
then type the question in the Headline field.
To remove this question from the survey, click Delete.
- (Optional) If you want to send a drop-down question to users who submit a
negative rating, click to expand the Drop down question section, then
configure your drop-down question:
- Headline: Text presented above the drop-down question that asks users to select an option.
-
Drop down options: Possible reasons why users might submit a
negative rating.
- Click the delete icon (
) to remove an option.
- Use the drag-and-drop icon (
) to move an option up or down in the list.
- Click Add option to add a new option.
To remove this question from the survey, click Delete.
- Click the delete icon (
-
- Click Save, then click Back to return to the Customer
satisfaction page to activate a channel for your CSAT survey.
The CSAT survey will not be sent to users until you activate at least one channel for it.
- In the Channels section, click the channel actions icon (
) for the channel you want to activate, then select Activate.
Activating a channel turns on the associated business rule to start sending the CSAT survey to users in that channel. To send a CSAT survey for messaging, you must have set up messaging.
- Click Activate rule.
Once you activate the rule, the channel Status will show as Active on the Customer satisfaction page. To view CSAT results, see Viewing your CSAT score and ratings.
Turning off the CSAT survey
Turning off a CSAT survey removes the CSAT survey and deactivates all channels. If you want to turn off the survey for a specific channel only, see Deactivating a CSAT channel.
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Customer satisfaction.
- In the upper-right corner of the page, click Actions, then select
Turn off customer satisfaction.
- Click Turn off.
The CSAT survey is removed and no longer sent to users.
72 comments
Gabriela Manarim
Tetiana Gron Sure, I already made that change and was able to complete it in CSAT via email. But when the channel is WA/MSG the sending is done by the "send satisfaction survey" trigger. In this context, I can't, for example, make one brand keep the current survey and another use the customizable survey. My goal with this is to test this new option to see if it will affect my response rate, as it opens a new window for evaluation.
1
Shawna
Is there a feature for CSAT on voice calls?
1
Tetiana Gron
Shawna no it is not available in the voice call. You can send a CSAT survey via email or sms after the call.
0
Yaniv Dayan
Tetiana Gron Since we do not want to overload our users with survey emails, we built a whole set of triggers to send CSAT to the client's 5th ticket. I hope there will be something similar or some kind of random CSAT.
0
Matt Farrington Smith
Initially I was excited to hear about the new CSAT experience, BUT after reading through all these comments it seems the experience is yet again below par.
How you deem this functionality is ready for public consumption is beyond me. So many bad design decisions, and the lack of actual reporting is insane. Why also does the speed of future updates appear to be operating at a glacial pace? 2026 for some…!
3
Shawna
I agree with Matt. I swapped to the New CSAT survey format, as I was excited to gain better data to use for our Customer Service model. Only to be told that the data is not accessible unless I build and API report. They have not released the report for the dashboard, nor can you create a report to capture the data. (Unless you can code using API) This was very discouraging, and quite frankly a let down. Why offer this great feature, but no way to interpret the data?!?! Do better Zen Desk!
2
Sam
Yes, agreed with Matt and Shawna. Shipping a half-baked feature is worse than not shipping at all. Explore reporting should be a launch criteria at this point.
1
Sam
Also, is there a reason why the support comments on these pages collate chronologically versus reverse-chronologically? Can this be switched? Seems like a very confusing practice to put the latest and greatest feedback all the way at the end….
0
Rachel Martin
I finally enabled the new CSAT experience again after ironing out the issues with our response rates, and introduced the 5 levels of response, even though I know that you can only report on on 2 in the back end. I wanted the customers to at least feel that they had the ability to give nuanced feedback. However, I quickly discovered that having 5 levels of response hides the comments box and is only accessible if you scroll down in the CSAT pop up. Needless to say customers did not do this, and so although I was getting good volumes of responses, I got no comments, even with a prompt at the top (which looked naff!)
In the end I was forced to reduce the options to 2, just so the comments box would show! Everything with Zendesk seems to be a compromise; if you want one feature to work, you have to sacrifice effectiveness in another!
2
Tetiana Gron
Thank you Rachel Martin for feedback! I’m happy to hear that you were able to increase the response rate. We are committed to enhancing the CSAT experience in messaging.
0
Ben Chapman
Tetiana Gron We were using the {{satisfaction.rating_url}} to send via SMS after a Talk call was completed so customers that may not have an email associated with their ticket (but since it's Talk they have an phone number) would receive an SMS message with the url link to take a survey. This has been hugely successful at collecting Talk satisfaction info as it happens immediately at the completion of the call and on the customer's phone which is already in hand.
In the new CSAT experience, I don't see placeholder for a survey link; will adding the Action “Notify by > Request messaging satisfaction survey” work if sent via SMS? If not, is there a way to collect CSAT from Talk Calls without requiring email addresses?
0
Dan Lucy-Lloyd
Tetiana Gron Like Shawna we are trying to set up CSAT following Zendesk Talk calls. As per your suggestions I'm trying to set this up via text message but I can't see a way to do it. There doesn't seem to be any mechanism to send any of the built-in CSAT requests via SMS following a call, and I have tried creating a trigger that sends an SMS notification requesting a reply with a score in from the end user, but when they reply it creates a new ticket. Please can you help?
0