A practical guide to the Freshdesk CSAT survey

So, you just closed a support ticket. The customer seemed happy, but how can you really be sure? Guessing isn't much of a strategy when you're trying to build a loyal customer base. This is exactly where the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey comes in, a crucial tool for measuring the quality of your support right inside platforms like Freshdesk.

It’s your most direct line to understanding what customers are actually experiencing, one ticket at a time. This guide will walk you through what a Freshdesk CSAT survey is, how to get it running, and, just as importantly, where its built-in features start to fall short. We'll also look at how modern AI tools can help you move past just collecting scores and start actively improving them.

What is a Freshdesk CSAT survey?

Customer Satisfaction, or CSAT, is a simple metric that tells you how happy a customer is with a specific interaction. It’s not about their grand, sweeping feelings for your brand, but more of a quick snapshot. It answers the question: "How did we do on that recent support ticket?" or "Was that delivery experience a good one?"

The built-in Freshdesk CSAT survey is designed to capture this feedback automatically. As soon as you resolve or close a ticket, Freshdesk can send out a simple, one-question survey asking the customer to rate their experience. You get to customize the scale, offering options like a straightforward "Yes/No," a 3-point scale, or more detailed 5- or 7-point scales. Customers can also add comments to explain why they chose a particular rating.

The main goal here is to get a quick pulse check on your team’s performance. It helps you see which agents are knocking it out of the park and where service quality might need a little attention, all on a ticket-by-ticket basis.

How to set up a native Freshdesk CSAT survey

Getting started with the native survey in Freshdesk is refreshingly simple, which is a big part of its appeal. Here’s a quick walk-through of the process.

Creating and customizing your Freshdesk CSAT survey

First, you'll want to head over to your admin settings. In the "Workflows" or "Configuration and Workflows" section, you should find an area for Customer Satisfaction. From there, you can start a new survey. You’ll give it a name and write the main question your customers will see in the email, something like, "How would you rate the support you received?"

You can also design the "Thank You" page customers land on after submitting their rating. This is a nice little spot to ask a follow-up question or just leave a friendly message. Freshdesk lets you add up to 10 more questions, but a word to the wise: keep it short. The fewer questions you ask, the more likely people are to actually finish the survey.

Configuring Freshdesk CSAT survey triggers

Next up, you need to decide when the survey goes out. Freshdesk offers a few choices:

• When a ticket is resolved

• When a ticket is closed

• Manually, whenever an agent decides to send it

These triggers are linked to your email notifications. For example, if you want the survey to go out when a ticket is solved, you just need to make sure the "Agent solves the ticket" notification is switched on for your customers. The survey link simply gets tacked onto that email.

Activating and managing your Freshdesk CSAT survey

Once you have everything set up the way you like it, you can save the survey and flip it on with a simple toggle. One important thing to keep in mind is that you can only have one survey active at a time. While Freshdesk lets you create up to 10 different survey templates, only one can be out there collecting responses.

Freshdesk also gives you a basic reporting dashboard to see an overview of your responses, neatly sorted into positive, neutral, and negative feedback. It's a decent place to start for tracking your overall score.

A screenshot of the Freshdesk analytics dashboard, which can be used to track Freshdesk CSAT survey results and other key metrics.

Limitations of the standard Freshdesk CSAT survey

While the native tool is handy for collecting basic feedback, it has some real limitations for teams that want to do more than just watch a number go up or down.

The rearview mirror limitation

The survey is sent after the conversation is over. It's a lagging indicator, telling you about a problem that has already happened. While it’s good for flagging a bad experience, it does nothing to stop the next customer from running into the same exact issue. You're constantly playing catch-up.

Drowning in comments

Freshdesk is great at collecting open-ended comments, but it offers zero tools to analyze them at scale. If you're running a busy helpdesk, it's flat-out impossible for a manager to read every single comment. This means a goldmine of insights, like recurring complaints about a bug, confusion over a return policy, or praise for a specific agent's empathy, gets completely lost. You can't spot trends without sinking hours into manual analysis.

Why the survey doesn't tell you the real 'why'

A low score tells you a customer is unhappy, but it doesn’t tell you why. Was it a gap in your knowledge base that made them create a ticket in the first place? Does an agent need more training on a new feature? Is your product documentation a bit of a mess? The survey itself doesn't connect the dots, leaving you to guess what you should fix.

It only measures the final interaction

The feedback is tied to the ticket and the agent who closed it. But customer frustration often starts building long before they ever talk to an agent. Maybe they struggled with a confusing help center article or couldn't find the right information on your website. The standard survey completely misses this bigger picture, focusing only on the last step of a much longer journey.

Beyond the survey: Using AI to improve CSAT results

So, the native survey has its limits. But what if you could use that feedback to actually get ahead of problems? This is where adding an AI layer on top of your helpdesk can make a huge difference. It’s not about replacing the Freshdesk CSAT survey, but about making the feedback you collect infinitely more useful.

Tools like eesel AI are built for exactly this. It connects to your Freshdesk account in a single click and gets to work on your existing data within minutes, with no complicated setup.

Automatically analyze customer feedback

An AI platform like eesel reads everything, not just the survey comments, but every single ticket you've ever received. It acts like a super-fast analyst who can instantly spot patterns in negative feedback that would be invisible to a human scrolling through a handful of responses.

A huge plus is that eesel AI trains on your past tickets from day one. It learns your unique customer issues, your brand voice, and what a good resolution looks like for your company, all without you having to manually train it.

Proactively fix the source of bad scores

Remember how we said low CSAT often starts with bad or missing help articles? eesel AI tackles this head-on. It identifies successful ticket resolutions and automatically drafts new knowledge base articles based on them. This helps you plug the gaps that cause customer friction, preventing future tickets and the bad CSAT scores that can come with them.

Help agents give 5-star service every time

Nothing makes customers happier than getting their issue solved on the first try. An AI Copilot can help make that the standard. eesel AI's Copilot works right inside Freshdesk, drafting accurate, on-brand replies for your agents in seconds. It pulls information from past tickets, macros, and your entire knowledge base (even from outside sources like Confluence or Google Docs). This gives both new hires and veteran agents the right information at their fingertips, leading to faster, more consistent service and, you guessed it, better CSAT scores.

An example of eesel AI Copilot drafting a reply to a customer query inside Freshdesk, which improves service quality and Freshdesk CSAT survey scores.

Test and predict improvements with confidence

Changing your support workflow can feel like a bit of a gamble. How do you know if a new tool is actually going to move the needle? This is where eesel AI's simulation mode really stands out. You can safely test-drive the AI on thousands of your past tickets in a sandbox environment. You'll see exactly how the AI would have responded and get a reliable forecast of how much it can improve things like resolution time and CSAT, all before you turn it on for live customers. It takes the guesswork out of implementation.

Freshdesk pricing plans for CSAT surveys

One quick heads-up: the Customer Satisfaction Survey feature isn't available on every Freshdesk plan. You'll need to be on one of their higher-tier plans to access it. According to their pricing info, the feature kicks in starting with the Pro plan.

Here's a quick breakdown:

Freshdesk Plan	Price (per agent/month, billed annually)	Key CSAT Feature
Growth	$15	Does not include CSAT surveys
Pro	$49	Includes Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Enterprise	$79	Includes advanced CSAT features

*Pricing can change, so it's always a good idea to check the official Freshdesk pricing page for the latest details.

Improve results from your Freshdesk CSAT survey

At the end of the day, the native Freshdesk CSAT survey is a valuable and easy-to-use tool for gathering feedback. It's a fantastic first step toward understanding your customers.

But its real power is unlocked when you move beyond just collecting data. The limits of manual analysis and reactive workflows can hold your team back from making real, meaningful improvements. The gap between knowing your score and knowing how to improve it is where a lot of teams get stuck.

AI can be the bridge between feedback and action. Tools like eesel AI work with Freshdesk to help you understand the why behind your CSAT scores, give your agents the tools they need to deliver better service, and proactively improve the entire customer experience from the ground up.

Instead of just tracking scores, you can start improving them. See how eesel AI can enhance your Freshdesk support and turn customer feedback into your biggest strength.