How to Set Up CSAT Surveys in Gorgias

What a Gorgias CSAT survey actually measures

A satisfaction survey in Gorgias fires after a ticket is closed, asking the customer to rate the interaction on a star scale. The rating is stored against the ticket and the agent who handled it, then rolled up into your satisfaction reporting so you can see trends rather than one-off reactions. It's a lightweight, native feedback loop — no third-party tool required — and it's the fastest way to put a number on something that otherwise lives only in gut feel.

The important thing to understand up front is that CSAT is not sent on every closed ticket. Per Gorgias' documentation, a survey only goes out when a set of conditions are all true: there's at least one message from the customer and one reply from an agent, the whole conversation is longer than 250 characters, the agent's last reply happened less than a week before close, and the ticket is on an eligible channel. That gating is deliberate — it stops you surveying auto-closed noise or one-line acknowledgements and keeps your response rate honest. If you want a deeper conceptual tour of the feature, we cover it in Gorgias CSAT explained; this guide is the hands-on setup.

Step 1: Open the CSAT settings and enable the survey

Everything lives in one place. Per Gorgias' Send Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys documentation, you configure the survey from the Workflows area.

1. From your helpdesk, click the dropdown menu in the top-left corner and select Workflows.
2. In the menu, locate Tools, then select CSAT.
3. Enable the satisfaction survey if it isn't already on.

That single screen is where the channel toggles, the message editor, and the timing control all live — you won't need to hop between settings pages to get a working survey.

Step 2: Choose which channels get surveyed

Gorgias lets you decide which ticket interactions receive a survey, and not every channel is eligible. Surveys can only be sent when the ticket channel is Chat, Email, Contact Form, or Help Center — social-media tickets (Instagram, Facebook, and similar) are excluded, because there's no clean way to deliver a rating prompt in those threads. Contact Form and Help Center support were added more recently, so if you last touched this a while ago it's worth revisiting.

1. In the CSAT screen, check or uncheck the boxes next to the ticket types you want to survey.
2. For most ecommerce teams, Email and Chat are the workhorses — enable those first.
3. Add Contact Form and Help Center if those are meaningful volume for you.

A common pattern is to survey Email and Chat (your resolved WISMO and returns conversations) but hold off on channels where responses are sparse, so your CSAT number stays representative rather than skewed by a handful of ratings.

Step 3: Write the survey message

The survey message is the customer-facing prompt, and you can personalise it with variables. Keep it short, warm, and unambiguous about what the stars mean.

1. Type your message in the message field on the CSAT screen.
2. Use the dropdown menus at the top of the editor to insert variables — for example, the customer's name or the agent's name — so the ask feels human rather than robotic.
3. Preview it as a customer would read it: one clear line, then the rating.

A good ecommerce message reads like a person: "Hi {{customer name}}, thanks for reaching out about your order — how would you rate the help you got from {{agent name}}?" That's friendlier than a generic "rate your experience," and it tends to lift response rates.

Step 4: Choose the trigger point — when the survey fires after close

This is the setting that quietly makes or breaks your response rate, and it's the heart of the CSAT screen. You choose how long after a ticket is closed the survey is sent, from a dropdown.

1. On the CSAT screen, open the timing dropdown ("send the survey ___ after the ticket is closed").
2. Pick a delay. If you leave it unset, Gorgias defaults to 2 hours after the ticket is closed — which is a sensible middle ground: long enough that the customer isn't mid-conversation, short enough that the experience is still fresh.
3. Click Save Changes.

Why the delay matters: fire it instantly and you can catch a customer who's still typing a follow-up; wait too long and they've forgotten the interaction entirely. Two hours is the documented default for a reason, but the right answer depends on your channel — a live chat about a checkout bug might warrant a shorter wait than a multi-day email thread about a return.

Remember the guardrails Gorgias applies on top of your timing: a reopened ticket won't get surveyed before the delay expires, snoozed and deleted tickets are skipped, and a ticket that's closed more than once won't send duplicate surveys.

Step 5: Read your satisfaction stats

Collecting ratings only helps if you actually read them. Gorgias surfaces CSAT under Statistics → Support Performance → Satisfaction, where the score rolls up so you can see it by agent and over time. A few practical notes from the docs worth knowing:

• Survey links expire after 3 months, so old, unanswered surveys stop skewing your data.
• Customers can re-score — a rating isn't necessarily final.
• If a ticket is reassigned, satisfaction attributes to the new assignee (with a short delay of roughly 10–15 minutes).

Treat the number as a trend line, not a verdict on a single ticket. If you want tighter control over which tickets get surveyed — say, only surveying first-time buyers or excluding refund escalations — you can layer Gorgias rules on top to exclude specific tickets from the survey, which is a cleaner lever than fiddling with the global toggles.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer picks up

Gorgias' native CSAT is genuinely good at what it does: it's simple, well-timed, native to your help desk, and it needs no extra tooling. Credit where it's due — for most Shopify and ecommerce teams it's all the satisfaction measurement you need. But notice what it can't do. CSAT measures the experience; it doesn't improve it. The score tells you Tuesday's chat queue frustrated shoppers — it can't go back and answer those tickets faster. It's a rear-view mirror, not a steering wheel.

It's also only as representative as your volume allows. The 250-character floor and channel limits mean a lot of quick, one-line resolutions never get rated at all, so your CSAT reflects your longer conversations more than your fast ones. And the survey can't distinguish a low score caused by a slow reply from one caused by a policy the customer didn't like — you get the number, but not the why without reading the ticket.

This is the seam where an AI agent layer fits, and it's worth being clear-eyed about the build-versus-buy tradeoff before you reach for one. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists to do the reasoning-heavy work a survey can't: actually resolving the ticket. Macha is one such layer — it runs on top of the Gorgias you already use as a native, live connector, and it does not replace your help desk or its CSAT surveys. You connect Macha to Gorgias, and it reads and writes the same tickets your surveys already rate: answering WISMO by looking up order status through a custom tool that turns your Shopify or shipping API into something the agent can call, handling routine returns and subscription changes, and drafting grounded replies so the experience a customer eventually rates is faster and more consistent. The clean division of labour: keep Gorgias CSAT as your source of truth for how customers feel, and layer an agent on top to lift the thing they're rating.

One honest contrast worth flagging on billing. Gorgias' own AI Agent is billed per resolution — you pay each time it resolves a ticket. Macha's model is different: credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution, so you're not paying a flat fee for outcomes that vary in complexity. The full breakdown is on the pricing page. If you're still mapping the Gorgias landscape more broadly — rules, macros, views, and how CSAT fits — what is Gorgias is a good orientation, and Gorgias macros explained pairs well with CSAT since a consistent macro-driven reply is exactly what shoppers end up rating.

FAQ

Where do I set up CSAT surveys in Gorgias? From your helpdesk, click the dropdown menu in the top-left corner, select Workflows, then find Tools and select CSAT. That one screen holds the channel toggles, the message editor, and the timing control.

When is the survey sent after a ticket closes? You choose the delay from a dropdown on the CSAT screen. If you don't pick one, Gorgias sends the survey 2 hours after the ticket is closed by default. You can shorten or lengthen that depending on your channel and how fresh you want the feedback.

Which channels support CSAT surveys? Surveys are only sent on Chat, Email, Contact Form, and Help Center tickets. Social-media channels are excluded. Contact Form and Help Center support was added more recently, so re-check your toggles if you set this up a while ago.

Why aren't my customers getting surveys? Gorgias only sends a survey when all conditions are met: at least one customer message and one agent reply, a conversation longer than 250 characters, an agent reply less than a week before close, and an eligible channel. Snoozed, deleted, and reopened-before-delay tickets are also skipped.

Can I add AI to Gorgias CSAT without replacing Gorgias? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha connects to Gorgias as a native, live connector and runs on top of your existing help desk and its CSAT surveys — it doesn't replace them. It helps raise the score by resolving WISMO, returns, and subscription questions faster, while Gorgias stays the system of record for how customers feel.

Ready to lift the experience your customers actually rate? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Gorgias in minutes.