So, by now, a lot of Zendeskers out there have made great use of the wonderfully simple, yet elegant Customer Satisfaction Ratings Professional and Enterprise plans. But there’s something more there that you can do with this tracking system. I feel this idea could be of great use to the community at large. First, let me present you – the “Agent” -- with a problem, a quandary, if you will, and will present the thought and ideas, and the solution.

When a customer loves the quickness and promptness of your answer, and gives you a “Yes, I’m satisfied” answer – that is an awesome feeling! As a support agent, you can’t beat the feeling of an ‘internet thumbs-up’, a proverbial 'pat on the back'. It’s even better when the customer notes “Give Good Guy Greg a raise, he’s the greatest!”, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, today... it’s not a good day for Pessimistic Paul, who’s just looking to spread the word of negativity to all that surround him, even his favorite product – your company’s pride and joy. So even though you may have given the best answer you could have, Paul just didn’t think it was good enough or quick enough, so he says, emphatically “No, I’m not Satisfied”. That is frustrating, but it’s our job as support agents and managers to defuse the situation and make Pessimistic Paul become Positive Paul.

The problem

Out of the box – the Customer Satisfaction ratings system seems completely static! Boy, would that be a mistake to make -- there’s so much you can do! With a bit of customization, you can sculpt Customer Satisfaction Ratings to reflect exactly how you want your business’ customer satisfaction to run. Spice it up with some triggers!

My tip today involves creating a trigger so that when your agents or yourself receive a bad or ‘unsatisfied’ comment through your Zendesk, you can turn the situation around and ask to be re-evaluated, and get that rating changed ASAP!

Once you’ve received the “unsatisfied remark”, regardless of whether it’s your fault or not, you want to make it right. So you meet with your co-workers, or you devise a plan of your own to make your customer happy.

In our case, we prefer to devise a game-plan as a team, and then call our customer. We apologize for the unsatisfying comments, and ask if we can help further. The personal touch and approach with your customers can lead to an overwhelmingly positive response from them. (On the other hand, there are some customers who can’t be pleased - but we still try our best!)

The solution

So you’ve made your customer happy - now what? We would prefer to have them change their negative rating to a positive one, right? Let’s make that Trigger! The trigger consists of adding a tag to the original ticket so that you can have an email 

In Zendesk Support as an administrator, to make this change, please follow these steps:

1. Click the Admin icon in the sidebar, and under Business Rules, select Triggers.
   
   
2. Select ‘Add Trigger’ and name your trigger.
   In our case, I named ours “Followup on Satisfaction Rating (after Phone Call)”. Rolls right off the tongue! ;)
   
   It must meet ALL of these Conditions:

• Tags contain at least one of the following: You can name your tag anything, but make it easy for your agents to remember. We went with followup_satisfaction for our team.
• Status is Solved. We don’t want to be having these follow-ups sent unless the requested ticket has been solved by the staff.
  
  

So to explain in a succinct statement: Once the agent has completed and made the customer as happy as can be, have them finish out the ticket by marking it Solved, and have them add the tag you have created.

What will we want this trigger to do?

The trigger should email the requester. You can personalize this message, as we have done, but the most important thing to remember is to add the Zendesk placeholder of {{satisfaction.rating_section}} at the end (or beginning!) of your email. This section will automatically display to your customer a small area for them to easily change their BAD rating to a GOOD one!

Note: We also have the trigger remove the tag, in the off chance that the ticket is ever opened again by that customer, so that we can start the process all over again.

As you can see below, our customer is happy after our call, and was able to easily change the rating from the email they received!

Thanks again for your time, and hope this Trigger tip was of great help to you!
See you next time, and have fun Zendesking!

Bonus Manager tip: As the support manager, I feel it's a good idea to also have an email sent to yourself when one of your agents adds the appropriate tag. It lets you know your agents are on top of it. I personally have the trigger also send an email to me to let me know my agent has sent their ticket to the client to be re-evaluated, that way I can make sure everything is correctly followed up on.