A complete guide to the Freshdesk NPS survey in 2025

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of those metrics that really matters. It’s a direct look at customer loyalty and a pretty solid signal of your company’s health. If you’re on the support team using Freshdesk, keeping an eye on NPS is a big part of understanding your customer experience. But, as you may have discovered, it's not as simple as flipping a switch.

While Freshdesk is a beast when it comes to managing tickets, its own survey tools have some serious limitations if you want to properly measure and act on NPS feedback.

This guide will walk you through the ins and outs of the Freshdesk NPS survey. We’ll look at the built-in options (and why they fall short), check out some popular third-party tools, and then explore a more modern, AI-powered way to not just track your score, but actually make it better.

What is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey?

At its heart, NPS comes from one straightforward question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?" It’s designed to boil down customer loyalty and satisfaction into a single, easy-to-understand number.

Based on how they answer, customers are grouped into three buckets:

• Promoters (score 9-10): These are your champions. They love what you do, stick around, and tell their friends about you.

• Passives (score 7-8): These folks are content, but not exactly thrilled. They’re not about to leave, but a competitor could probably tempt them away.

• Detractors (score 0-6): These are your unhappy customers. They’ve had a bad experience, are at risk of churning, and might even share their negative feedback online, which is never fun.

As Freshworks’ own guide points out, NPS is a direct pulse on your business. For support teams, a sinking score is a major red flag. It often points to problems like slow response times, unresolved tickets, or agents giving out confusing or wrong information.

How to set up a Freshdesk NPS survey: The native options and their limits

Here’s the thing about Freshdesk: it's fantastic for managing customer support conversations, but its native tools are really built for Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, not NPS. If you want a real NPS score, you have to get creative with a workaround.

Understanding Freshdesk's built-in surveys

Freshdesk lets you build and customize CSAT surveys that can be sent automatically when a ticket is resolved. If you’re on one of the higher-priced plans, you can even tweak the survey questions to gather more specific feedback.

But here’s the kicker: Freshdesk’s own support documentation is very clear that it has no native feature to calculate an NPS score. What’s their official advice? Use a third-party tool like SurveyMonkey. This isn't just a small missing feature; it's a real gap for any team that's serious about tracking customer loyalty.

Why native CSAT isn't a Freshdesk NPS survey

You might be thinking, "Can't I just edit the CSAT question to sound like the NPS one?" You could, but it ends up causing more headaches than it's worth.

For starters, CSAT surveys usually run on a 3 or 5-point scale (like "Good, Bad, Neutral"). NPS absolutely needs the 0-10 scale to work properly. Even if you did create a custom question that looked right, you'd be stuck doing everything else by hand. That means exporting all the responses, manually sorting them into Promoters, Passives, and Detractors, and then crunching the numbers yourself in a spreadsheet. It’s a slow, clunky process that’s just begging for errors, and it definitely won't work as your company grows.

This patched-together method leaves your customer feedback completely separate from your day-to-day support work. It’s an inefficient manual chore that shines a light on a missing piece in the platform.

Top third-party integrations for your Freshdesk NPS survey

Because of these native roadblocks, most teams head over to the Freshworks Marketplace to find a tool specifically for running a real Freshdesk NPS survey. Let's break down a few of the usual suspects.

Popular survey tools for your Freshdesk NPS survey

Tools like SurveyMonkey, AskNicely, Simplesat, and Customer Thermometer are all built to integrate with Freshdesk and fill this void. They typically use triggers, like a ticket being closed, to automatically email a properly formatted NPS survey to the customer. The results then get pulled into that third-party tool's dashboard for you to analyze.

Here’s a quick look at how they compare:

Feature	SurveyMonkey	AskNicely	Simplesat
Primary Function	General-purpose surveys	NPS-focused platform	CSAT, CES, and NPS surveys
Integration Method	Freshdesk Marketplace App	Observer rules & API	Embeds in notification emails
Key Advantage	Very flexible and powerful	Deep NPS analytics & workflows	Simple one-click surveys
Potential Downside	Can be complex; data is siloed	Another tool to learn and manage	Less focus on survey design

The problem with relying only on integrations

While these tools do a good job of solving the collection part of the puzzle, they create a new set of problems. The biggest one is data silos. All that valuable feedback, the qualitative "why" behind every score, ends up living in a separate dashboard, totally disconnected from the original Freshdesk ticket. Your agents lose the context they need to understand what really went wrong during that customer interaction.

Even more importantly, surveys are reactive. They tell you about a bad experience well after the fact. By the time that low score comes in, the customer is already frustrated. The real goal shouldn't just be to get better at collecting feedback; it should be to stop those bad experiences from ever happening.

Beyond the Freshdesk NPS survey: Using AI to proactively boost your NPS

The most powerful way to earn a high NPS score isn't by staring at survey dashboards, but by delivering a consistently great support experience. This is where AI for Customer Support Automation can really change how you operate.

From measuring NPS scores to improving experiences

Think about what actually causes low NPS scores in customer support: slow replies, wrong answers, and making people repeat themselves over and over. Surveys are just measuring the symptoms, not fixing the root cause.

Instead of adding another tool to your tech stack just to measure feedback, you can use an AI agent that works directly inside your helpdesk to improve the quality of every single interaction. That’s the approach we’ve built at eesel AI.

A screenshot showing the eesel AI Copilot drafting a reply to a customer query within the Freshdesk interface, illustrating how AI can improve the Freshdesk NPS survey experience.

Unlike survey tools that sit outside your workflow, eesel AI works inside Freshdesk to resolve customer issues instantly and accurately.

• Learns from your best agents: The eesel AI AI Agent trains on your past support tickets to understand your brand’s voice and what a great resolution looks like. It learns to solve problems the way your top-performing agents would, which directly leads to higher NPS scores.

• Goes live in minutes: Forget about scheduling mandatory demos or sitting through long sales calls. You can connect eesel AI to Freshdesk with a click and set everything up yourself. It's designed to be completely self-serve.

• Provides instant, accurate answers: By connecting to all of your knowledge sources, like your help center, Confluence pages, Google Docs, and past tickets, eesel AI makes sure customers get the right answer the first time. This heads off the frustration that fuels detractor scores.

How eesel AI keeps you in control

Handing things over to AI can feel a bit nerve-wracking, but you don't have to give up control for the sake of automation. eesel AI is built to give you total confidence before it ever speaks to a customer.

• Simulate with confidence: You can use a powerful simulation mode to see exactly how the AI would have handled past tickets, including ones that got low NPS scores. This lets you pinpoint which types of issues you can safely automate and prove the value before you even turn it on.

• Customize actions and persona: You can set the AI's tone of voice and define the specific actions it can take, like escalating a tricky issue to a human agent or tagging a ticket based on customer sentiment. This ensures the automated experience still feels personal and aligned with your brand.

• No rip-and-replace: eesel AI fits right into your existing Freshdesk setup. You don’t have to switch platforms or tear down your current processes. You can start small, maybe by automating just one type of simple ticket, and then expand as you get more comfortable.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, which helps analyze how to improve your Freshdesk NPS survey score by testing AI responses.

Freshdesk pricing and your NPS survey

When you're thinking about adding any tool to your support workflow, the total cost of your helpdesk is always part of the conversation. Here’s a quick breakdown of Freshdesk’s plans.

Plan	Price (per agent/month, billed annually)	Key Features for Surveys
Free	$0 (for up to 10 agents)	Basic Ticketing, Knowledge Base
Growth	$15	Custom Ticket Statuses, Reporting
Pro	$49	Custom Reports, CSAT Surveys
Enterprise	$79	Skill-based Routing, Audit Log

It's also worth keeping in mind that Freshdesk's own AI features, like "Freddy AI Copilot," are often a paid add-on that costs an extra $29 per agent per month on top of the Pro or Enterprise plan. These costs can pile up, making a solution with more transparent pricing an attractive alternative.

Final thoughts on the Freshdesk NPS survey

Trying to run a native Freshdesk NPS survey isn't really an option. While third-party integrations can help you gather the data, they offer a reactive solution that keeps your feedback walled off from your agents. You end up learning about problems long after they’ve already soured a customer's experience.

The best way to improve your NPS is to deliver great service, consistently, from the very first time a customer reaches out. An AI-powered tool like eesel AI helps you do just that by automating resolutions with speed and accuracy, right inside the workflow you already use.

It's time to stop just measuring customer dissatisfaction after the fact and start preventing it.

Ready to see how AI can improve your customer experience and give your NPS a boost? Try eesel AI with your Freshdesk account for free.