Last updated: 2026-03-09

Source: https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/50000007448-setting-up-customer-satisfaction-surveys-legacy-csat-

Setting up customer satisfaction surveys (Legacy CSAT)

Customer satisfaction rating (CSAT rating) remains one of the best ways to gauge how your customers feel about your service and support. It refers to the percentage of customers that picked a positive answer to the survey question sent at the conclusion of an agent-customer interaction.

The Customer Satisfaction Survey is a built-in functionality of Freshdesk that can be used to directly measure helpdesk efficiency and customer satisfaction with every support ticket. You can use the customer satisfaction report to analyze your agents’ relative performance, which can, in turn, help you assess your service and provide better guidelines to train support people in the future based on past results.

Using Freshdesk, you can send a survey question to your customers, choose the point scales (2, 3, 5, or 7), and ask additional questions. A single account may create up to 10 satisfaction surveys; however, only one survey can be active at any given point.

    • Important considerations and limitations

  • Once surveys are sent, they cannot be withdrawn. Customer replies will be recorded.
  • Survey results are recorded based on ticket resolution and are specific to the agents who handled the tickets. This allows you to filter the survey results by agents to analyze individual performance.
  • To manage the survey results for a list of tickets, you can add a tag to these tickets. You will now be able to filter them while reporting on the surveys.
  • The Bulk Ticket Manager Light app from Freshdesk Marketplace allows you to add tags to multiple tickets at once.

    • Create your surveys

    To set up your surveys:

    1. Login as an admin. 2. Navigation: - For Freshdesk, go to Admin > Workflows > Customer Satisfaction > New Survey - For Freshdesk Omni, go to Admin Settings > Configuration and Workflows > Ticket Customer Satisfaction 3. Give your survey a name and enter your primary question (the question that customers will see in the email, below the agent signature). 4. Choose a point scale of your choice. While the default point scale is 3, you could also choose a 2-, 5- or 7-point scale as well. Here are some examples of the different point scales: - 2-point scale (Yes, No) - 3-point scale (Agree, Undecided, Disagree) - 5-point scale (Poor, Bad, Neutral, Good, Very Good) - 7-point scale (Very Poor to Exceptional) 5. You can choose between the default text or edit the point choices by clicking on them.           

    Once a customer takes the survey, the point scale will be locked down, and the survey settings cannot be edited. You can, however, rephrase the questions and edit the answer options. Please make sure that the questions and answers are in context, as the responses collected before the edits are made will be shown under the new survey questions in the report.

    Designing your 'Thank You' page

    Once the customer clicks on the primary question to give you their feedback, they will be taken to the Thank You page, which can have any combination of the following:

  • A 'thank you' message
  • A text box where customers can leave more comments (enable this by checking the Collect additional feedback option)
  • Additional survey questions

    • Adding Additional Survey Questions

  • To add survey questions on the Thank You page, click on the Add survey questions link.
  • Choose a point scale and add up to 10 questions for your additional survey. Please note that all the additional questions must have the same point scale and point choices.

    • Controlling when the survey is sent

    As an administrator, you will have the option to choose when the survey goes out to the customer. Surveys can go out:

    1. When the ticket is closed 2. When the ticket is resolved 3. When the agent sends out replies to a ticket 4. When the agent chooses to send it out

    If you choose to send the survey when the ticket is closed or resolved, you'll need to enable the corresponding email notification under either Admin > Workflows > Email Notifications > Requester Notifications > Agent closes the ticket OR Agent solves the ticket. The survey will be sent along with the appropriate notification.

    When you choose to let your agents send surveys as they see fit, they will have to select the checkbox below the reply editor to send their survey.

    Note: Surveys will not be triggered when the requester is an agent.

    Saving and enabling a survey

  • Once you're done setting up the primary survey question, designing your thank you page and selecting how and when the survey should be sent out, click Save.
  • You will be redirected to the Satisfaction survey dashboard.
  • Saving the survey does not mean that it's live - click the ON/OFF slider to the left of the saved survey to enable it.

    • Satisfaction Survey Report view

    The Overview and the Responses tab of the Satisfaction Survey group the responses into 3 buckets - positive, neutral and negative. For instance, if you have set up a 7-point scale survey, the responses get split as 3-1-3; for a 5-point scale, it'll be 2-1-2 and so on. You can see the Overview and Responses at a glance and also for every question in the survey.

    You can also see the survey report for a particular Group or Agent by clicking on the corresponding tabs.

    The Responses tab shows a list of the individual responses sent in by customers who responded to the survey.

    Get to know more about improving survey response rates by creating customer satisfaction surveys in your customer's preferred language.