Skip to main content
All CollectionsAI & AutomationAutomationSettings
Measure customer satisfaction with conversation ratings
Measure customer satisfaction with conversation ratings
Ivan avatar
Written by Ivan
Updated this week

Conversation ratings enable you to gather feedback from users and visitors on their interactions with your team. When a teammate closes a conversation with a customer, your bot will send a simple survey asking how their experience was.

This can be enabled using:

Turning on conversation ratings in your Basic settings allows you to turn ratings on/off for all conversations.

If you wish to have more customisation over when and who receives a conversation rating when the conversation is closed or have follow up actions based on the rating the customer provides, check out how to achieve this with Workflows here.

You can view a report of your conversation ratings to monitor your support team’s performance, as well. This helps managers spot and reward star performers and identify opportunities to improve the quality of support their team provides.


Enable your conversation ratings

First, go to For users or For leads, under Automation > Basics.

Then, under the section Ask for conversation rating, turn the automation on.


Disable conversation ratings on outbound conversations

You may not want to request ratings on conversations started directly from your inbox, as these can often be related to existing conversations or involving third parties.

If this is the case, simply disable the toggle "Sending for direct outbound conversations".

Enable conversations ratings on conversations started from Workflows

Conversation ratings can still be sent after a teammate closes a conversation for conversations that were started by a Workflow.

You can enable this by switching the toggle to "Sending rating requests for outbound conversations started via the API or Workflows", like you see below 👇

Teammates must still participate in a conversation for it to be eligible to receive a rating.

Prevent customers from rating after a given period of time

You can prevent your customers from giving a conversation rating after a certain amount of time has lapsed since the conversation closed.

Once you enable "Prevent customers from rating after a given period of time", you can specify a number of hours up until a customer can provide their conversation rating 👇

This setting acts as a fallback if you haven't configured it through Workflows.

Prevent customers from changing their rating after a period of time

You can also prevent your customers from changing their conversation rating after a certain amount of time has lapsed since the conversation closed.

Once you enable "Prevent customers from changing their rating after a given period of time", you can specify a number of hours up until a customer can change their conversation rating 👇

Note:

  • Preventing customers from changing their rating will not prevent them from giving an initial rating unless the "Prevent customers from rating after a given period of time" setting is toggled "On" as well.

  • If a teammate closes the Messenger and re-opens the conversation later, they will not be able to change the rating once the time period passes. If a user rates the conversation but leaves the conversation open and comes back after the time period set, it appears to them that they can change the rating the rating however this change will not be recorded on our end as the timeframe has passed.

  • This setting acts as a fallback if you haven't configured it through Workflows.


How the bot sends conversation ratings

When a teammate closes a conversation with a customer, the bot is signaled to send a conversation rating. The bot sends conversation ratings for both in-app messages and emails. The rating is applied to the teammate who last sent a message or email in the conversation.

Here’s how ratings look in the Messenger 👇

And here’s how they look in email 👇

When customers click on a reaction, they’ll be requested to give additional feedback.

Customers can't change their rating after they've left one with a comment.


Adding Messenger apps to closed conversations

A teammate can send a Messenger application to close out their conversations, instead of the standard Intercom Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) app. The teammate can choose to insert their app by:

  1. Turning on the Ask for conversation rating automation.

  2. Selecting Add an app.

  3. Choosing an app from the list of installed apps or exploring the Intercom App store to install and add a new app.

This feature only works with Messenger apps. It is not available for Inbox apps.

If a custom/third-party CSAT app is inserted only it will appear when a conversation is closed - the Intercom CSAT app will not appear.


When does your Basic bot send conversation ratings?

Your Basic bot only sends conversation ratings at the right time. A rating appears when a conversation matches the following criteria:

  • The conversation was replied to by a teammate OR a teammate starts a direct outbound conversation OR the conversation was started from a Workflow where a teammate also participated.

  • The conversation is over 250 characters (including spaces, and replies from your teammate and customer). This helps ensure ratings don’t send for short conversations with a simply yes/no answer.

  • The conversation is closed within a week of the last reply. If you or the customer hasn’t replied to the conversation in seven days, we won’t send a conversation rating, to prevent them from appearing on old conversations.

  • It's not a group conversation. Your bot will not send a rating request when more than one user/lead are included in the conversation.

  • Provided other criteria is met, a CSAT request will be sent any time it is included in a workflow. However, Teammates will still only be able to receive one rating per conversation. If multiple requests are sent for the same teammate in a conversation, these will all appear but are effectively a single request/rating. They will all update together if a rating is received.

    When conversation ratings are sent via Workflows?

  • It's not a group conversation. Your bot will not send a rating request when more than one user/lead are included in the conversation.

  • Conversation must have at least one message from a valid agent. This means that the conversation must have at least one message sent by the Workflow, Fin or a teammate.

  • If teammate created an outbound conversation either manually or via the workflow but never sent anything after that initial part, we would not send CSAT in this case.

  • If conversation was sent via the workflow and did not get any reply from the end user, CSAT still going to trigger.


See how your team performs

To see how people feel at the end of their conversations with your team, just take a look at your conversations ratings summary.

Note: You can also see the conversation ratings each of your teammates received over a specific time period.


Best practices for conversation ratings

Turn your dissatisfied customers into happy ones

Conversation ratings help you better understand your customer’s experience, and provide you with the information you need to make your customers happy.

For example, you can follow up with customers who left a negative conversation rating and help turn their experience around. Just click the drop-down arrow, and select "terrible" or "bad" to see comments left by your customers. From here, you can follow up with people and resolve their issue.

Set happiness targets for your team

You should set happiness targets for your team, so you ensure the majority of your customers are happy with their experience. For example, hearts and smileys can be counted as positive. Anything else can be counted as negative.

Rewarding your team for exceeding these targets will motivate them to deliver a more personal experience.

See happy comments in one place

Have you ever wondered what your happy customers are saying about you? Simply use ⌘ / Ctrl K from the Help Desk and search for "Your achievements".

You'll see your achievements appear in the right sidebar in your Inbox. 👇

You can see what your customers love about your support. This should provide your team with extra motivation to delight every customer.

Send conversation ratings when you’re ready

If you’re not ready to close a conversation and trigger the conversation rating message, you can snooze the conversation while you’re waiting to resolve the customer’s issue.

Get better conversation ratings

If you’re waiting for a customer to reply, it’s best to snooze the conversation. Then, when the conversation re-opens you’ll be reminded to follow up. Your customer will appreciate the extra effort you’ve put in to ensure they get the help they need.

How is CSAT measured?

When a conversation is closed, a survey is sent to the end user with 5 options.

  • Positive ratings: 😀 and 🤩

  • Neutral ratings: 😐 and 🙁

  • Negative ratings: 😠

To calculate an individual or a team's CSAT score, we divide the number of positive responses by the number of responses overall.

(😀 + 🤩 conversations) / (all conversations with any rating)

For example, if a teammate has received ten ratings as follows:

🤩 x 2 | Positive

😀 x 2 | Positive

😐 x 2 | Neutral

🙁 x 2 | Neutral

😠 x 2 | Negative

The teammate's score will be 40% = 4 positive ratings out of 10 total ratings.


💡Tip

Need more help? Get support from our Community Forum
Find answers and get help from Intercom Support and Community Experts


Did this answer your question?