Allow Customers To Opt Out Of Satisfaction Questionaires

Zendesk’s  Satisfaction feature allows customers to rate individual tickets after they have been solved. By default, the satisfaction email is sent by an automation. If you have customers that send a high volume of tickets, this additional email may be distracting. This article shows how customers can self service to opt out of the satisfaction notice using an email link on the notice itself.

Customers can still rate satisfaction and comment using the Web Portal or the Help Centre.

Create a User Field to Store Settings

Under Manage>User Fields, create a new custom checkbox to hold whether a customer has opted out of surveys. 

Modify the Satisfaction Automation

The default automation created when activating satisfaction is ‘Request customer satisfaction rating (System Automation)’. Locate this automation under Admin> Business Rules>Automations.

Add a new condition to the ‘Meet All of the following conditions’ section to ensure that the ‘Requester: Opt Out of Satisfaction Surveys’ is ‘unchecked’. 

The satisfaction automation will no longer fire when the user field is set.

Create an Automation for Customers That Have Opted Out

To ensure that customers that have opted out of notifications can still use Satisfaction, clone the satisfaction automation. Change the condition to only fire when the requester has opted out of surveys. 

And the only action needed it to offer the satisfaction rating.

Agents can now manually set whether each customer is to receive the satisfaction notice by selecting the checkbox against the customer's profile. To allow customers to self service, we need to create a new support address and a trigger to process the request.

Create an Unsubscribe Support Address

Under Admin>Channels>Email, create a new support address to monitor the unsubscribe requests. For example,  UnsubscribeSatisfaction@yourCompany.zendesk.com

Create an Unsubscribe Trigger

Under Admin>Business Rules>Triggers, create a new trigger.

This trigger will:

• Check for a new ticket sent to the unsubscribe support address.
  
  
• Check the requester's satisfaction survey custom field.
  
  
• Tag the ticket ‘unsubscribe\_satisfaction\_request’. This will assist with monitoring and reporting.
  
  
• Finally, as no action is required by the agent on this ticket, the ticket status can be set to ‘closed’.

Triggers fire in the order they are listed from the top to the bottom. For the Satisfaction Survey Unsubscribe trigger to work correctly, it needs to fire before you normal requester notifications. Re-order the trigger and place it at the top of your list.

Now if the customer emails to  UnsubscribeSatisfaction@YourCompany.Zenesk.com, they will be automatically unsubscribed from the satisfaction notice.

Include a Unsubscribe Mail Link

To complete the customer self service we can include a link for them to click to generate an unsubscribe email.

The best place to include this is the satisfaction survey automation.  Go back to the satisfaction automation and include the following text in the notice:

To stop receiving Customer Satisfaction surveys, click here and send the email as-is to our team.

Ensure that the address after ‘mailto:’ matches your support address. It may look like this:

Check Your Other Triggers

When the customer clicks to unsubscribe from satisfaction notices, a new ticket is created. You may not want the end user to receive a ticket acknowledgement email for this new ticket.

Check the trigger ‘Notify Requester of Received Request’. By default, this will not fire if a newly created ticket has a solved status. We can modify it also not to fire when the ticket is closed.

Similarly, you may have triggers to notify agents of received requests. Modify these to exclude closed tickets or the tickets that have been tagged with ‘unsubscribe_satisfaction_request’.