Using Gorgias satisfaction surveys to keep subscribers
How Gorgias CSAT surveys work, what the satisfaction score measures, and how to turn low ratings from subscribers into follow-ups that prevent cancellations.
By Florian
Gorgias sends a short survey after a ticket closes: how satisfied were you, from 1 to 5? For a subscription store, each low score is a subscriber telling you, in private, that something went wrong, while they are still a subscriber. Most stores look at the average and move on. The value is in the individual answers, and in what you do in the next 48 hours.
This guide explains how Gorgias CSAT surveys are sent and scored, what the satisfaction report does and does not tell you, and how to set up a follow-up routine that uses low scores to keep subscribers. It relies on Gorgias’s documentation: sending CSAT surveys, measuring satisfaction, excluding tickets from surveys, chat preferences, the rule builder and the API’s SatisfactionSurvey object (all accessed November 2026).
How Gorgias sends surveys
Per Gorgias’s CSAT documentation:
- You choose which ticket types get a survey, write the survey message, and set how long after closing it is sent. With no delay selected, it goes out 2 hours after the ticket closes; reopening the ticket before then stops it.
- A survey is only sent if the ticket has at least one customer message and one agent reply (rule messages and notes do not count), the last agent reply was less than a week before closing, and the channel is chat, email, contact form or Help Center. Social media tickets do not receive surveys.
- For chat, CSAT is switched on in the chat integration’s Preferences tab (“Send CSAT”), and needs a connected email address to send from (chat preferences).
- You can exclude tickets with rules, for example by channel, tag, language or customer email.
The API’s SatisfactionSurvey object stores a score from 1 to 5, and there is one survey per ticket.
What the satisfaction report measures
Gorgias’s satisfaction report defines the satisfaction score as the share of rated surveys scoring 4 or 5 among all surveys rated in the period, and the response rate as the share of sent surveys that got a response. It shows the 1 to 5 distribution and lets you switch between positive (4–5) and negative (1–3) comments.
That is a quality measure for your support team. It is not a churn measure, for three reasons:
- It rates one ticket. A 2 may be about the agent, the product, the delivery company or your refund policy.
- Responders are self-selected. Delighted and furious customers answer more than the indifferent middle.
- An average hides the person. A score that stays steady can contain a handful of very unhappy subscribers.
Decide which tickets to survey
Before you use scores for retention, decide what you want to measure:
- Cancellation tickets. A survey after a cancellation measures how smooth it was. That is worth knowing, but those scores should not be mixed with the rest. Tag them (
subscription-cancel) and either exclude them from the survey or report on them separately. - Refund disputes and complaints in progress. If a customer is already angry about a charge, a survey link can feel tone-deaf. Consider excluding tickets tagged with an open refund or dispute.
- Everything else. Delivery issues, product questions, subscription changes: these are where a low score is an early warning.
Write a survey message that invites a useful answer
Gorgias lets you write the survey message yourself (sending CSAT surveys). A few choices make the answers more useful for retention:
- Keep it short and specific to the ticket. “How did we do with your question about your last box?” reads better than a generic request for feedback.
- Ask for a comment, not just a score. One line inviting the customer to say what could have been better gives you the reason behind a low score, which is what you will act on.
- Do not promise a reward for a good rating. It skews the answers and makes the score meaningless.
- Say who reads it. “A member of our team reads every answer” is only worth writing if it is true, and it makes customers more likely to explain themselves.
The follow-up routine
The goal is simple: every subscriber who scores 1 or 2 hears from a person within one working day.
Step 1: find low scores quickly
Gorgias’s rule builder includes a Satisfaction Survey Responded trigger, which runs when a customer submits a response. Use it to tag or reopen tickets for review. Whether your rule builder lets you filter that rule by the score itself is something to check in your account; the documentation we reviewed does not spell it out. If it does not, review the negative comments view in the satisfaction report every morning instead.
Step 2: read before replying
Open the customer timeline. Is this their first problem or their third? Did a box arrive late last month too? Are they on their first order or their twentieth? The reply depends on the answer.
Step 3: reply to the specific problem
A follow-up that says “Sorry you had a bad experience, here’s 10% off” teaches nothing and costs margin. A follow-up that says “You said the replacement arrived damaged too. I’ve sent another by express and flagged the packaging issue to our warehouse” keeps subscribers.
Match the response to the cause:
| What the low score was about | Useful follow-up |
|---|---|
| Delivery late or damaged | Replacement or credit, and what you changed |
| Product disappointment | Offer a swap to another product |
| Slow or unhelpful reply | Apology from a lead, and the actual answer |
| Price or policy | Clear explanation; offer what you genuinely can |
| Cancellation process | Fix the process; do not try to win them back in the same message |
Step 4: record the outcome
Add a tag such as csat-followed-up and use the Resolution ticket field. After a quarter, you can see whether subscribers who got a follow-up stayed longer than those who did not.
Checking whether scores predict cancellations
Do it once with your own data before building a habit around it:
- Export low and high scores with customer email and date.
- Join with subscription data: who cancelled within 90 days.
- Compare groups: scored 1–2, scored 3, scored 4–5, never responded.
- Report counts, not just percentages. With a few dozen low scores, small differences mean nothing.
If low scorers cancel clearly more often, the follow-up routine is worth its time. If not, CSAT stays a support quality tool and you look for churn signals elsewhere, such as intents and sentiments, repeated skips or failed payments. Our guide on finding what predicts churn covers the method.
Doing this with NoChurn
NoChurn’s Gorgias connector is read-only: it reads tickets and never sends surveys, tags or replies in Gorgias. Tickets are matched to your customers by email; doubtful matches are suggested for you to confirm and never merged automatically. Matched tickets feed a churn score from 0 to 100 and a churn drivers view (correlation, not causation, with sample sizes), and serve as dated, verbatim evidence for disputes on Stripe and Braintree. Survey settings, follow-ups and the satisfaction report stay in Gorgias. See NoChurn + Gorgias.