A practical guide to Zendesk CSAT reporting in 2025

Let's be honest, customer satisfaction (CSAT) is the pulse of your support team. But trying to get clear, useful insights from your Zendesk CSAT reporting can sometimes feel like you’re trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing. If you've ever spent an afternoon building custom reports or toggling between different apps just to see what's going on, you know exactly what I mean.

This guide is for you. We're going to walk through Zendesk's native reporting tools, talk about the common headaches they cause, and show how a little bit of AI can help you spend less time digging for data and more time actually improving customer happiness.

What is Zendesk CSAT reporting?

At its core, Zendesk CSAT is a simple feature that lets you gather feedback after you’ve solved a ticket. The standard survey asks, "How would you rate the support you received?" and customers get two options: "Good" or "Bad."

Zendesk CSAT reporting, then, is just the process of gathering and looking at the results from those surveys. The main number you'll see is the CSAT score, calculated with a straightforward formula:

(Number of "Good" ratings / Total number of ratings) x 100 = CSAT score %

This data shows up in a few different places across Zendesk. And while the idea is simple, the way Zendesk organizes this information is what often leads to some real challenges when you need to understand the story behind the numbers.

How to find your data with Zendesk’s built-in tools

Zendesk doesn’t have a single, unified spot for all your CSAT reporting. Instead, your data is scattered across a few different areas, and each one has its own quirks and limitations.

The Zendesk support dashboard

First up is the basic view that every agent can see. It gives them a quick snapshot of their own performance, showing the number of "Good" and "Bad" ratings from the past week and an overall CSAT score for the last 60 days.

It’s great for a quick daily pulse-check for individual agents. The downside? It's pretty limited. You can't see team-wide data, look at trends older than 60 days, or understand the context behind a rating without clicking into each ticket one by one.

Zendesk Explore

When you need to dig a bit deeper, you'll head over to Zendesk Explore, the platform's dedicated reporting tool. The pre-built "Satisfaction" tab gives you a much better overview, with metrics like overall CSAT, response rates, and how your score is trending over time.

But here’s the catch: many of the reports you’d think are standard, like a simple breakdown of CSAT by agent, aren't actually pre-built. You have to follow a "recipe" to build them yourself. This can be a real time-sink and assumes you're already comfortable navigating Explore's metrics.

So, while Explore is good for spotting bigger trends, it often requires manual work for basic reports. Plus, the data can be oversimplified (a 3-out-of-5 rating just gets labeled "Bad"), making it hard to see the "why" behind the scores.

Zendesk Marketplace apps

To fill in the gaps, many teams turn to the Zendesk Marketplace. Apps like the "Satisfaction Console" can give you more powerful search and filtering tools for your CSAT results. While helpful, this means adding another tool to your workflow, and it usually comes with an extra per-agent cost. It’s a decent workaround, but it’s another paid add-on in a separate interface.

The common frustrations with Zendesk CSAT reporting

Because the tools are so spread out, most support leaders run into the same few problems when all they want is clear, reliable data.

1. Manual and complex reporting

As Zendesk's own help docs show, creating what should be a basic report often involves following a complicated, multi-step recipe. This isn't just a small inconvenience; it's time you could be spending coaching your team or improving your support processes. For instance, if you want to see if there's a connection between CSAT and the customer's sentiment, you have to build custom calculated metrics. For most people, that’s not exactly an intuitive Tuesday morning task.

2. Lack of detailed data

Zendesk's default CSAT survey lumps everything into either "Good" or "Bad." So if you're using a 1-5 scale, a neutral score of 3 gets thrown into the same bucket as a very negative score of 1. You lose all the nuance, which makes it tough to know what to prioritize. As many people have pointed out in Zendesk's community forums, getting the actual number a customer gave you requires digging into the API, which just isn't realistic for day-to-day work.

3. Inaccurate reporting

The way Zendesk logs data can sometimes throw off your reports. CSAT is usually tied to the date a ticket was solved, not the date the customer left the rating. If a customer gives feedback a week late, it can retroactively change last week's numbers, making it feel like you're always chasing a moving target. To make matters worse, if a ticket gets passed between agents, the last person to touch it often gets full credit (or blame) for the CSAT score, even if someone else did all the heavy lifting.

4. Difficulty acting on feedback

Seeing a bad score is one thing, but doing something about it is another. When a customer leaves a negative rating, a manager has to kick off a manual follow-up process: find the ticket, assign it to someone for review, and then track what happens. There’s no built-in, automated way to turn that feedback into a resolution.

Going beyond Zendesk CSAT reporting: How AI actually improves CSAT

Instead of just looking for a better reporting tool, what if you could tackle the root causes of bad CSAT scores and make your existing data easier to act on? This is where adding an AI layer like eesel AI to your Zendesk setup can make a huge difference.

Get to the root cause with unified knowledge

A lot of the time, bad CSAT scores happen because agents give slow or inconsistent answers. This isn't their fault; it's because company knowledge is usually scattered all over the place. An AI-powered agent doesn't just look at your help center. eesel AI connects to all your knowledge sources in minutes, past tickets, macros, Confluence pages, Google Docs, you name it. This allows it to provide fast, accurate, and consistent answers that lead to happier customers, improving your CSAT score from the ground up.

Automate your response to CSAT feedback

What if every negative CSAT rating could automatically trigger a follow-up? With a tool like eesel AI's AI Triage, it can. You can set up a simple rule that says any ticket with a "Bad" rating is automatically tagged, reopened, and assigned to a team lead for review. This closes the feedback loop instantly and turns a bad experience into an opportunity to win back a customer, all without anyone lifting a finger.

Predict and prevent bad CSAT with simulation

Why wait for bad feedback to come in? eesel AI’s simulation mode lets you test your AI setup on thousands of your own past tickets. You can see exactly how it would have responded, forecast your automation rate, and spot any gaps in your knowledge base before it ever talks to a real customer. It’s a risk-free way to fine-tune your support and get ahead of issues that would have led to poor satisfaction scores.

Unlike other survey tools that just give you another dashboard to check, eesel AI works right inside your helpdesk to make your team more effective. It’s a solution that goes live in minutes, not months, and works with the setup you already have.

What does Zendesk charge for CSAT features?

To get Zendesk's native CSAT features, you'll need to be on one of their "Suite" plans. The CSAT survey option kicks in at the Suite Professional plan.

Plan	Price (per agent/month, billed annually)	Key CSAT & Reporting Features
Suite Team	$55	Basic ticketing, but no native CSAT surveys.
Suite Professional	$115	Includes CSAT surveys and customizable reports with Zendesk Explore.
Suite Enterprise	$169	Everything in Professional, plus more advanced features like custom agent roles.

This pricing is based on info from Zendesk's pricing page and can change.

Getting more out of your Zendesk data

If you're struggling with Zendesk CSAT reporting, it's probably a sign that your tools just aren't keeping up. Zendesk’s built-in options are a decent place to start, but they're often too clunky and fragmented for teams that are serious about great service.

Instead of wrestling with custom reports, you can give your team an AI layer that not only clarifies your data but helps you do something about it. With automated workflows for negative feedback and risk-free simulations, you can finally shift from being reactive to proactive.

Ready to see how AI can change the way you handle customer satisfaction? Try eesel AI for free and see how it can level up your Zendesk setup in just a few minutes.