TABLE OF CONTENTS


Note: This feature is currently in private beta. Please write to [email protected] to get advanced CSAT enabled for your account.


Customer satisfaction score (CSAT score) is one of the best ways to gauge how customers feel about your service and support. It is one of the most straightforward ways to measure customer satisfaction, and it's obtained by asking a simple question, such as 'How satisfied were you with your experience?.’


The Customer Satisfaction Survey is a built-in functionality of Freshdesk that can be used to directly measure helpdesk efficiency and customer satisfaction rating for every support ticket by sending out surveys at different points in the ticket lifecycle. You can use the customer satisfaction report to assess your service and provide better guidelines to train support people in the future based on past results. 


Let us now see how you can set up a CSAT survey within Freshdesk. 



Setting up a new survey

  • Go to Admin -> Workflows -> Customer Satisfaction

  • Click on ‘New Survey’ in the top right corner

  • Choose a template from our curated list; Freshdesk has a list of 11 pre-built templates to suit any use case. 

  • You can also choose one from the survey templates that you created while building a previous survey.

  •  As an example, let us assume you want to create  a Support(Simple) survey - choose the template and click on ‘Apply this template.’

  • Next, you can add a ‘name’ and ‘description’ and hit Apply this template.



Building a Survey

  • At the very top of the survey screen is the logo. You can click on the logo to change it.

  • Below the logo is the welcome text. Click on the text to edit it.

  • You can click on the question to edit the text and add placeholders to it as per your requirements.

  • Add new questions by clicking on the '+' button after the questions. The CSAT module supports the following types of questions:

    • Multichoice - Single answer

    • Long text answer

    • Multichoice multiple answers

    • Rating scale

    • Yes/No

    • Short text answer

  • The very last card is the thank-you message. This is displayed when the survey is complete. Click on the text to edit it.


Survey customization settings

  • The right panel on your screen lets you customize the survey questions and change the survey settings to suit your needs.

  • You can select the rating scale visuals from smiley faces/emoticons, stars, text boxes, and a numbered rating scale. 

  • You can also select the scale range (choose up to a 10-point scale). Select the order in which the score options appear, and customize the rating labels.

  • Click 'Advanced customization’ to change the score range and define the negative, neutral, and positive score groups per your preferences.


Survey look and feel customization

The right panel has four icons that let you customize the look and feel of your survey.

  1. The ‘Languages’ setting lets you define the language in which you want your survey to be displayed

  2. You can have multiple languages for a survey. This can be added in the language section. 

    1. The default language is set to English; you can add more languages in the ‘Supported Languages’ field.

    2. You can also send surveys in the contact’s preferred language - which language the contact gets the survey in is decided based on the language of that contact.

  1. Under design settings, you can upload your logo, add the company name, add a favicon, choose the survey layout, and select your brand colors for buttons, backgrounds, and so on.

  1. Under Survey settings, you can customize the survey name and add a survey description. 



Survey flow - Configuring Skip logic

  1. How the survey moves from one question to another can also be customized. This is done using Skip Logic. 

  2. Skip logic lets you create a survey that shows questions to respondents based on their responses. The advantage of implementing question branches is improved response rates, as customers will only see questions relevant to their responses. 

  3. Under Question Settings on the right panel, scroll to the bottom and click on Skip Logic. 

  1. Choose the appropriate action. With Skip Logic, you can direct a user to the next question, specific questions, questions based on the answer, or to the end of the survey.


Skip Logic actions

Once a question has been answered, you can:

  1. Direct customers to the next question - Customers will be directed to the next question, irrespective of what their response recorded is. 

  2. Direct customers to a specific question - Once a question is answered, customers can be directed to a specific question.

  1. Ask questions based on the rating - Show different questions based on the response shared. Customers can be directed to a question relevant to the answer selected.

  1. Ask questions based on the rating group - Show questions based on the rating groups (negative, neutral, positive), as defined in the survey settings. 

  1. End the survey - Show respondents the configured thank you message as soon as the response is shared and end the survey.

  2. Skip logic can only point to any follow-up questions and not to any previous questions. e.g. Assume you have a 5-question survey. If you are setting up a skip logic for Question 3, the skip can only go to any subsequent questions (Question 4 or 5). 


Survey statuses

Once created, there are three statuses for a survey:

  • Draft: A survey is in the draft stage when you are actively making edits and configurations and haven't clicked on ‘Publish.’. A draft is also not visible to the public. You can make multiple changes to a draft survey without worrying about your audience.

  • Active: A survey can be made active by publishing it. The survey will not start collecting responses unless it is linked to an automation or made manually available to the agents to attach to ticket replies.

  • Paused: An active survey is paused to make certain changes or edits to the questions or other configurations. While paused, recipients will not receive the survey.


Saving and enabling a survey

Once you finish customizing your survey, you must save and publish it to enable agents to use them. 

  • Discard - Discard all changes and start building from scratch.

  • Preview - Preview the survey to understand how it looks.

  • Save/Save as template - Save the survey to keep it aside for future use. You can also save it as a template to clone and use it to build other surveys.

  • Publish - A survey will become active only after you Publish it. 


Sending out a CSAT survey

Once you finish building the survey, you have to send it out to customers to collect feedback. With the Freshdesk CSAT module, you can do this in two ways. 


  • As a separate email - The survey will be automatically sent as a separate email once the criteria set under the automation rule is met.

  • Manually attach to a ticket reply - The survey will be available for agents to attach using the reply editor.



Let us see how to configure each of these in detail.


Case 1 - Send as a separate email

To send out the survey as a separate email, you must set up automation rules to define when the email has to go out; for example, when an agent marks a ticket as Closed. Learn more about ticket update automation rules and how to set them up here. 


To send the CSAT survey as a separate email:


  1. Click on ‘Collect responses’ on the top bar

  2. Click on ‘Edit survey mail’ to customize the Subject, Preheader, and body of the email. 

  1. Click on ‘Set up automation rules’ to configure when you want the email to go out. You can create a new Ticket update rule with the conditions you require.

  2. In this example, let us say you want the CSAT email to go out when an agent changes the ticket status. To configure the ticket update rule:

    1. Click on ‘Create ticket update rule’

    2. Create a rule name, say CSAT trigger

    3. Set the conditions as ‘When an action performed by ‘Agent’

    4. Involves any of these events - Status is changed from ‘Any status’ to ‘Closed’

    5. Under Perform these actions, select ‘Send survey to requester,’ and select ‘CSAT survey’

    6. Hit ‘Save and enable’ to save the automation rule

  1. Hit Save on the CSAT page, and the configured survey will now be sent as an email to customers whenever an agent marks a ticket status as ‘Closed.’


Points to be aware of for customers who are currently using the old CSAT module and want to upgrade to the new module:

  1. You have to re-configure any previous automations you may have set up for triggering the CSAT survey

  2. The existing survey that you have set up may not work during the interim when you migrate to the new module

  3. Your data and responses from the old module will be migrated to the new module. 


Case 2 - Manually attach to a ticket reply

You can enable agents to attach the survey to a ticket reply manually. You can also set access permissions for each agent group for the survey. Learn more about agent groups here. 


To enable agents to attach the survey to a ticket manually:


  1. Click on ‘Collect responses’ on the top bar

  2. Click on ‘Manually attach to a ticket reply.’

  3. Set access permissions for the survey:

    1. Access to all groups

    2. Access to specific groups

    3. Access to all groups except

  1. Hit Save and agents will be able to attach the survey through the reply editor.


To attach the survey to a ticket:

  1. In the Tickets reply editor, click on the ‘Include satisfaction survey’ icon.

  1. You can choose and preview the survey from the Surveys panel that opens up. 

  1. Once you preview the survey, click on ‘Insert,’ and the survey will be added to the ticket. 


Collecting CSAT survey responses

Responses allow you to view the answers received for the surveys you sent. You can view the responses and perform follow-up actions that help close the loop, gather specific feedback, and more. 


Each survey response is created as a ticket, and you can view individual responses on the ‘All Tickets’ page. To get a comprehensive view of survey responses, you can access the CSAT Survey Report, which is available under the Analytics module. 


Analyzing responses with the CSAT Survey Report 

Get an overview of responses received through the curated CSAT report available under the Analytics module. You can view responses split by percentage (positive, negative, neutral), no. of surveys sent vs. responses received, and more. To access the report:


  • Go to Analytics → CSAT Results Report

  • You have five tabs that will help you compare responses

  • You can filter results by Date Range, Group name, Agent name, and Survey name

  • The ‘Overview’ tab has four widgets:

    • Percentage of survey results - Positive/negative/neutral

    • Responses received - Total no. of surveys sent vs. no. of responses received

    • CSAT distribution trend - Breakdown of response distribution across positive/negative/neutral

    • Surveys sent and responses received trend - Graphical visualization of no. of surveys sent vs. responses received


  • You can expand each widget to view the numbers in detail, and click on ‘Show underlying data’ to view individual responses


  • The CSAT vs. Activity tab has four widgets that will give you insights on how ticket actions affect the CSAT rating

    • CSAT survey responses vs. total agent reply count

    • CSAT survey responses vs. total agent reply count

    • CSAT survey responses vs. CSAT rating emotion

    • CSAT survey responses vs. no. of group reassignments


  • The CSAT vs. Quality tab has four widgets that will give you insights on how the resolution/response quality affect the CSAT rating

    • CSAT survey responses vs. ticket resolution time

    • CSAT survey responses vs. ticket first response time

    • CSAT survey responses vs. tickets first responded within SLA time

    • CSAT survey responses vs. tickets first responded within SLA


  • You can also view survey results by Agent and by Group. 


Callouts for existing customers using the old CSAT module

Points to be aware of for customers who are currently using the old CSAT module and want to upgrade to the new module:


  1. Your old surveys will be deactivated, and you will have to set up your existing surveys from scratch once we enable the new CSAT module in your account.

  2. You must re-configure any previous automations you may have set up for triggering the CSAT survey.

  3. Your data and responses from the old module will not be migrated to the new module.  

  4. Customization of Hebrew and Arabic translation is not supported in the enhanced module.

  5. Previous analytics data from the older CSAT surveys will not be transferred to the new advanced CSAT Survey Reports.

  6. The curated report (CSAT Survey report) will show data once responses start flowing in for the surveys you set up using the upgraded module. 

  7. The analytics reports will support metrics to view the ratings for each survey. The rest of the responses cannot be viewed today.

  8. The advanced CSAT widget will replace the dashboard's rating widget.

  9. Unlike before, CSAT surveys cannot be published directly on the support portal. They can be distributed efficiently via email to gather feedback from your customers manually or using automation.