CSAT: Customer Satisfaction Surveys

What CSAT is

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) is a short survey attached to a ticket. After you resolve a request, the customer can rate their experience from 1 to 5 and leave an optional comment. It's the simplest, most direct measure of whether your support actually helped — and in StretchSupport it lives right on the ticket, so a rating always has its full context attached.

What a CSAT record contains

• Rating — an integer from 1 (worst) to 5 (best). Required.
• Comment — free-text feedback, up to 4,000 characters. Optional.
• Source — where the rating came from (defaults to support survey).

When a rating is submitted, StretchSupport records a csat_submitted event on the ticket's thread, tagged as customer-visible, with the rating and a timestamp in its metadata. Because it's an event on the ticket, the feedback is permanently tied to the conversation that earned it.

How CSAT is captured

1. Resolve the ticket — CSAT is meant for a request that has been answered.
2. The customer submits a rating from 1 to 5, optionally with a comment.
3. The rating is recorded on the ticket thread as a satisfaction event.
4. Agents and leads can see the rating in the thread and factor it into reporting and coaching.

Note: A rating must be a whole number from 1 to 5. Anything outside that range (or a non-integer) is rejected, so your satisfaction data stays clean.

Reading and acting on CSAT

• A 5 with a comment is a candidate for a testimonial or a shout-out to the agent who handled it.
• A 1 or 2 is a signal to review the thread: was the resolution actually complete? Did the ticket breach its SLA? Consider reopening (move the status back to Open) and following up personally.
• Comments often contain the most useful product feedback you'll get — route recurring themes to the relevant product team.

A realistic example

You resolve a ticket about a slow-loading dashboard. The customer submits a CSAT rating of 2 with the comment "Fixed eventually, but it took three days and I had to chase you." The rating and comment land on the ticket thread. Reviewing it, you see the ticket sat in Waiting Internal for two days without an update. You reopen the thread, apologize, confirm the fix is holding, and use the feedback to tighten your internal-wait follow-up cadence. The next similar ticket gets a proactive update and earns a 5.

Tips

• Trigger CSAT only after a genuine resolution — asking for a rating on an unresolved ticket depresses your scores unfairly.
• Read every comment, not just the number. The text tells you why the score was given.
• Treat low scores as reopening triggers, not just metrics — a fast, human follow-up on a 1 or 2 often turns the relationship around.
• Watch for tickets that breached SLA and scored low together; that pairing points straight at a process gap.

FAQ

What scale does CSAT use? A 1-to-5 integer scale, where 5 is the most satisfied. Comments are optional and can be up to 4,000 characters.

Can a customer rate an unresolved ticket? CSAT is designed for resolved requests. Ask for the rating once you've closed the loop so the score reflects the outcome.

Where is the rating stored? As a customer-visible event on the ticket thread, tagged csat_submitted, with the rating and submission time recorded — so the feedback and the conversation it rates always stay together.

Can a ticket be rated more than once? Each submission is recorded as its own event on the thread, so the full history of feedback on a ticket is preserved.