Full circle: CSAT, CSAT Prediction & Follow Up

This interactive “Full circle” session is about ways that you can use customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys in your Zendesk Support account. Utilizing CSAT puts you in a position to identify and meet customer expectations, measure your support organization, and provide differentiated support. In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Control your CSAT: Sometimes we don’t want to have every ticket receive a survey. By using conditions in your business rules, you can control when surveys are sent and who they’re sent to.
• Get ahead of a poor experience: Satisfaction Prediction helps turn a poor experience into a positive one while the ticket is still open.
• Follow up and report upon your CSAT scores: Reaching back out to a customer that replied with a bad CSAT rating and reporting upon these interactions can drive the differentiation that support teams are looking for.

Answering your questions in the comments below are members of our Customer Success Team. You’ll find them running online workshops designed to help our clients get more value out of their Zendesk accounts.

Most of the steps we’ll suggest in this post can only be updated by the administrators in your Zendesk Support account. Not sure if you’re an admin? Just head to your agent profile where you’ll see your role listed right up top. Reach out to an existing administrator if you think your role should be adjusted.

Part 1: Enabling your CSAT

Enabling CSAT surveys in your account is quite simple.  The default configuration requires only the click of a button to start surveying your end users. Use this article to help guide you in enabling CSAT. With the out-of-the-box settings, end-users receive an email 24 hours after the ticket has been set to solved that asks them to briefly evaluate their experience.

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. There’s also an option for customers to provide a comment if they want or you can enable the ability for a simple follow up question on bad CSAT ratings.

Part 2: Customizing your CSAT message

Zendesk’s CSAT is meant to be simple, encouraging the end user to reply without having to put in a lot of extra effort. Of course, keeping consistent with your brand is also important and you can do so by customizing the message sent with the CSAT survey.

By utilizing the CSAT placeholders in Zendesk, mixed with your own words, you can provide the end user a customized experience that can improve response rates and create the desired style. The placeholders, along with some custom HTML coding, give your team the flexibility to change how the Good/Bad rating shows in the email giving an even more customized look and feel.

Custom CSAT using {{satisfaction.positive_rating_url}} and {{satisfaction.negative_rating_url}} plus custom HTML

Part 3: Setting your conditions for a CSAT Survey to be sent

The default CSAT automation, “Request customer satisfaction rating (System Automation)”, sends the survey request email 24 hours after a ticket has been solved. But perhaps not every interaction needs a follow-up  survey. Some examples of these could be:

• Tickets created for a proactive outreach
• Tracking tickets for IT projects
• Or even as far as only sending out CSAT to those customers that haven’t received a survey in the past 3 months

Controlling who receives a survey is quite simple by making sure you are setting the desired conditions based on information in your Zendesk account. This article can help guide you through these conditions. CSAT fatigue can lead to an increase in poor ratings so think about the different situations carefully.

Part 4: Setting up and controlling access to CSAT Prediction

With CSAT prediction, you can get a better understanding of how a conversation is going—while you’re still in contact with the customer. Instead of waiting until the interaction is over for feedback, you can make changes in the moment to ensure a positive outcome.

Setting up CSAT Prediction is about as simple as it gets. This feature is only available on our Enterprise plan and can be enabled by navigating to Admin Center > People > Configuration > End users.

From there, let the Zendesk Predictive Model take over CSAT evaluation based on your:

• Time Metrics (like FRT, FResT, & wait time)
• Ticket Text (subject, description, & comments)
• Effort Metrics (including the number of replies, reopened tickets, & reassigned tickets)

Once the CSAT prediction is up and running you want to think about how you are presenting this information to your agents. You can include prediction scores in existing or new views to sort tickets based on how likely they are to earn a bad rating from customers. For example, if you create a ticket view that includes only tickets with a probability of <20%, this can help focus agents on the tickets that may become problematic.

For your satisfaction prediction scores to have a real impact on your overall customer satisfaction ratings, we recommend incorporating the information into your work processes, by using them as conditions integrated into business rules to power views, automations, and triggers.

Part 5: Escalating tickets with CSAT Prediction

Using the same criteria used for a view based on CSAT prediction, you also have the ability to create a trigger which sends an email to Tier 2 Support agents, or a management group, so they can intervene in the at-risk ticket.

Similarly, you can create an automation to check for low scoring tickets periodically, and send the same email. Getting ahead of the customer before the interaction gets worst, keeps everyone engaged and lets the customer know you are proactively taking their experience into consideration.

Part 6: Follow up and report upon CSAT

Inevitably, you’re going to receive a less-than-glowing response from time to time (rare as it may be). You can learn about the issues behind a bad satisfaction rating by asking these customers to select a reason using the satisfaction reasons feature.

Keeping with the simplicity of getting CSAT setup, turning on this feature is just as easy.

1. In Admin Center, click People > Configuration, End users, then select the Satisfaction tab.
2. In the Configuration Options section, click the checkbox to enable “Ask a follow-up question after a bad rating”. This opens the satisfaction reasons picklist.
3. Click Save Tab to accept the default reasons:

• The issue took too long to resolve
• The issue was not resolved
• The agent’s knowledge is unsatisfactory
• The agent’s attitude is unsatisfactory

This comes default with some predefined reasons but feel free to add in up to 5 of your own custom reasons.

If a bad CSAT is received, how do you want to handle it? Take a look at our addressing bad CSAT article that discusses options for turning that bad rating in to a good one!

Part 7: Follow up and Reporting on CSAT – Reporting

View your overall CSAT score, individual ratings, comments, and satisfaction seasons (if enabled) in the Customer Satisfaction dashboard. You can also export your CSAT  data.

This dashboard - which is available on the Zendesk Support Professional and Enterprise plans -  displays the total number of good ratings, bad ratings, and solved tickets for the reporting period.

There is also a feedback section at the bottom of this dashboard where you can filter across  individual rating and comments.

Part 8: Advanced reporting on CSAT

We are seeing accounts use CSAT reporting in Explore to drive a better customer experience.

A common example is creating a report that looks at one-touch tickets with a good CSAT rating which is then broken down by ticket type. This can help your team identify potential knowledge base articles that would improve ticket deflection and self-service for your customers.

Bringing it “Full circle”

Bill Gates really did say it best with “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

By utilizing Zendesk’s CSAT, you can put focus where focus is needed. Whether that be creating a more in-depth knowledge base, to identifying a need for more agent training on a specific topic.

Matching what your customers are looking for with the way you do business will allow your team to provide the differentiated support your customers will love.