Restricting Satisfaction Surveys by Date

Introduction

Customers with many tickets can become overwhelmed with satisfaction surveys. This frustrates the customer and can lead to invalid satisfaction metrics. This guide will show how to suppress a customer's notifications after a recent survey.

The inspiration and code comes from Moderator Joel Hellman. The typos are all mine.

Method

 To capture the last survey date, create:

• A user field to hold the notification date value
• An Webhook to populate the user field with a date 

To suppress notifications:

• Create a new automation offering satisfaction without a notification
• Change the standard automation to record the satisfaction notification date
• Order your automations to ensure the new automation fires before the standard automation

Custom date field

Go to Admin>Manage>User Fields and create a new date field, 'Last Satisfaction Date'.

Ensure you have a field key value, 'last_satisfaction_date'. The Webhook will use this.

Webhook

Go to the Admin Centre>Apps and Integrations>Webhooks.

Use the Action menu to create a new Webhook

Title: PUT API/ Users/Ticket Requester ID

URL: https://YOURURL.zendesk.com/api/v2/users/{{ticket.requester.id})

Method: PUT

Content type: JSON

Ensure you replace YOURURL with your own Zendesk.

For authorisation, tick the Basic authentication box. Enter an administrator's email address and password or create an API token.

The screen may look like this:

 

Create a new customer satisfaction automation

Go to Admin>Business Rules>Automations. Find your automation that sends satisfaction notifications. The default is 'Request customer satisfaction rating (System Automation)'. Clone this automation.

Rename the cloned automation to 'Customer satisfaction rating (Notification recently sent)'. Here is an example of the conditions.

Here the automation will fire if the ticket is not closed, has been solved for an hour and the satisfaction rating is not offered.

Add a further condition to check when satisfaction was last offered by email.

The trigger will now only fire if the satisfaction notification was sent in the last week.

In the Action section, remove the notification action. An action is still need to offer satisfaction to allow the customer to rate the ticket in the Help Centre.

For reporting, you can add a further action adding a tag to the ticket. You can then use Insights to track the impact of suppressing notifications.

Change the standard automation

Go to Admin>Business Rules>Automations and edit the standard satisfaction automation. Add a new action to notify target and select the 'PUT API/User/Ticket Requester ID' created earlier.

In the JSON body, paste the code:

{
"user":{
"id":{{ticket.requester.id}},
"user_fields": {
"last_satisfaction_date" : "{{ 'now' | date: '%Y-%m-%d' }}"
}
}
}

 

The action should look like this:

Order your automations

Ensure this new automation appears before the standard automation. Select 'Reorder page' from the more actions menu. Drag the new automation above the system automation.

Customers with a recent notification can rate their tickets in the Help Centre.

Customers without a recent notification will receive a new satisfaction survey notification. The user account custom date holds the last notification date.