Carly Buxton, PhD

Zendesk is a prominent player in the customer service software industry, a go-to solution for many businesses seeking to manage their support operations. With its suite of tools ranging from help desk software to analytics, the company claims to revolutionize customer experience. 

You can easily recognize the companies you patronize that use Zendesk, because you’ll often get an email not long after your interaction that looks like this:

Per the Zendesk website:

When you enable CSAT (customer satisfaction) ratings in Zendesk Support, end users receive a notification 24 hours after the ticket has been set to solved that asks them to briefly evaluate their experience, as shown here:

I understand the good intentions behind this, but it irks me EVERY TIME, because there REALLY needs to be a third option here. 

Many times as a customer, I’ve had a lackluster experience with their customer service agent, but I don’t want to say “bad, I’m unsatisfied,” because it’s hard to call it outright “BAD.” Maybe it was rocky, or there was room for improvement, but I don’t want to ding that customer service rep’s stats by performing the click-equivalent of Karen writing an all-caps negative review on Yelp.

At the same time, clicking “Good, I’m satisfied” also makes me feel a little miffed, even if the service rep sorted everything out to my satisfaction. Something happened to make me reach out in the first place: some glitch, some question, some issue. The fact that I had to take time out of my day and rhythm to reach out at all means that my experience with your product or service was not ideal, even if my experience with your customer service was. So clicking “Good” feels like I’m begrudgingly giving you a pat on the back that you don’t really deserve.

To the powers that be at Zendesk: rework this follow-up email.

I get that in the past, when you created this, you needed to quantify it. But now, with the power of AI, you are limiting your insight-gathering abilities by making this a charged scale (much less one with only 2 options, both extremes). Rather than recommending that you add a “meh” (middle-of-the-road) option to create a 3-point scale in this follow-up, I recommend that you ping customers with a free text box.

Would you like to share any thoughts about how your customer service experience went?

Mass-download your free-text responses in bulk, and use an AI program like Claude or AI Priori to analyze the data and pull out themes.

This will be MUCH more helpful to your insight bottom line, and it will make customers feel like you truly value their opinions after they’ve taken the time to reach out to your support desk.