I know the default survey uses emojis with hover-over text labels, but it seems like our customers might not be understanding the difference between each rating (see attached image). It’s starting to impact our metrics a bit.
I’d really like to keep using Intercom’s native CSAT tool for reporting and widgets, but I’m wondering:
Is there any way to customize the default emoji options (e.g., swap them out or show the text labels instead)?
Or do we know if there’s already a product request or feature idea out there for that?
Also related question, is it possible to tweak how CSAT is calculated in our instance? For example, could we have “OK” responses count as positive? A lot of our users are parents or older family members, and based on some past examples, “OK” seems to represent a satisfied response rather than a neutral or negative one.
Best answer by Paul Byrne
hi @Jobi John Paul here from support engineering to help you out 🤝
I can see how “OK” being visually similar to the other icons is causing confusion for some of your users. The built-in CSAT uses the 1–5 emoji scale and counts 4 and 5 as positive; there is currently no workspace setting to swap the emoji images or to permanently display the text labels for the native CSAT widget.
Here are two options I recommend, ranked by how much they keep native reporting intact:
Add a short tooltip or an in-conversation preface before the survey that clearly maps the emojis to words. This keeps native CSAT and reporting. You can create a clickable tooltip that opens the survey and which shows the legend “😡 = Very unhappy, 😐 = OK, 🤩 = Very happy.” See our tooltips runbook for the exact steps and selector guidance.
If you must count “OK” as positive in reporting, export survey responses or use the Surveys API and compute CSAT with >=3 treated as positive. This gives you control over the business definition while keeping Intercom surveys intact. I can provide the exact export/API calls and a spreadsheet formula (COUNTIF) to make that calculation
I hope this is now clear, and you have some options to manage this.
hi @Jobi John Paul here from support engineering to help you out 🤝
I can see how “OK” being visually similar to the other icons is causing confusion for some of your users. The built-in CSAT uses the 1–5 emoji scale and counts 4 and 5 as positive; there is currently no workspace setting to swap the emoji images or to permanently display the text labels for the native CSAT widget.
Here are two options I recommend, ranked by how much they keep native reporting intact:
Add a short tooltip or an in-conversation preface before the survey that clearly maps the emojis to words. This keeps native CSAT and reporting. You can create a clickable tooltip that opens the survey and which shows the legend “😡 = Very unhappy, 😐 = OK, 🤩 = Very happy.” See our tooltips runbook for the exact steps and selector guidance.
If you must count “OK” as positive in reporting, export survey responses or use the Surveys API and compute CSAT with >=3 treated as positive. This gives you control over the business definition while keeping Intercom surveys intact. I can provide the exact export/API calls and a spreadsheet formula (COUNTIF) to make that calculation
I hope this is now clear, and you have some options to manage this.
