CSAT surveys in Pendo: prompts that get answered

The CSAT surveys in Pendo that get answered all look the same: two questions, shown right after someone finishes a task, and gone the moment they answer. The ones that get ignored also look the same: five questions, shown on login, asking how the product is going in general. I have built both. The first kind is the only kind worth building.

At ShootProof, the satisfaction surveys that fed our print and payments work were this shape, a 1 to 5 rating followed by one open-text box, placed at the end of a specific job. One of them told us a feature people had not tried scored 1.9 out of 5 on “likely to use” while people who had tried it scored it 4.2 out of 5 on satisfaction. That gap is the whole reason to run CSAT at the task level instead of the product level.

Keep CSAT surveys in Pendo to two questions

Get the rating. Get the comment. That is the entire survey. In Pendo this is a guide with a poll step: a Number Scale poll for the rating, followed by an Open Text poll for the reason, shown only after a rating is chosen. Pendo’s poll formats are Open Text, Yes/No, Number Scale, and Multi-Choice, and responses land on the guide’s Poll Responses tab, where you can filter by segment, date range, account, and language, and download a CSV. The poll responses article covers where everything lives.

The rating prompt names the task. “How would you rate your experience adding a product to your store?” is a question someone can answer in one second because they just did it. “How satisfied are you with the product?” is a question that needs a think, and a think is where surveys go to die.

Balance the number and the words

The number gives you a score to trend. The comment gives you the reason, in the customer’s words, and it is the part that changes the product. Ask for it with a specific follow-up: “What would have made that easier?” after a low rating, “What worked well?” after a high one. A single open box with a generic prompt gets generic answers.

The comments are also your interview list. When someone writes three sentences in a CSAT box, send them a short email the same week, thank them for the specific point they made, and ask for 30 minutes. In my experience that email gets a yes far more often than any recruiting panel, because the person already cares. How to turn a pile of those comments into themes is in the post on open text survey responses.

Tie each prompt to a task, not a login

Timing is most of the response rate. Your customers use the product to finish jobs: add a product, send an invoice, deliver a gallery, close a ticket. Trigger the poll on the event that marks the job as done, and nowhere else. In Pendo that means the guide’s activation is tied to a Feature or Track Event for the completion step, with a segment that excludes anyone who answered in the last 90 days.

Here is the set I would start with for a typical B2B product. One poll per job, each with the same two questions, each on its own guide so the results stay separate.

Four polls is plenty. If you cannot name the job, you do not need the poll yet.

Iterate on the prompts, and retire the ones that fail

Review the Poll Responses tab monthly. A prompt with a low response rate is in the wrong place or asking the wrong thing: move it or rewrite it. A prompt that collects confused answers is ambiguous: rewrite it. A prompt nobody on the team reads: delete it. CSAT surveys in Pendo are cheap to change, so change them. The expensive mistake is leaving a bad poll running for a year and trending a number nobody trusts.

Put the scores where people will see them

A poll result that only lives on the guide page gets looked at once. Add the rating widget to the dashboard the product team already opens, next to the usage chart for the same feature, so the number and the comments sit beside the behavior. That pairing is what the Pendo dashboards post is about, and it is most of what we set up in Pendo analytics and reporting engagements.

Then categorize the comments by theme each month, take the top two themes to the product team with the verbatim quotes attached, and write down what happened to them. That record is what turns a survey into a feedback loop.

Close the loop with the customer

When a comment leads to a change, tell the person who wrote it. One sentence, by email: you told us the export was hard to find, it now sits on the main toolbar. It takes two minutes and it is the single best retention message you can send, because it proves the box is connected to something. In my experience response rates rise on the next poll when you do this, and fall when you do not, because customers learn whether the box goes anywhere.

Questions people ask

How many questions should a CSAT survey in Pendo have?

Two: a 1 to 5 Number Scale rating and one Open Text follow-up that appears only after the rating is given. Anything longer lowers the response rate and gives you less to act on, not more.

When should a CSAT survey appear in the product?

Right after the customer completes a specific task, triggered by the feature click or track event that marks it done, and never on login. Exclude anyone who answered in the last 90 days so the same people are not asked twice.

Where do Pendo poll responses show up?

On the guide’s Poll Responses tab, or through the Guide Metrics tab by selecting the poll question. You can filter by segment, date range, account, and language, download a CSV, and add the results to a dashboard next to the usage data for the same feature.

If your polls are running but nobody reads the responses, or you are not sure where to place the first one, bring your Pendo account to a free Pendo strategy call and we will pick the first two jobs to survey together.