Troubleshooting CSAT survey delivery
If a CSAT survey never arrived, the most common causes are the prevention window blocking it, quiet hours deferring it, a demo-seeded conversation, or an unanswered phone/voice call — demo conversations and unanswered calls are excluded from CSAT delivery by design.
Settings → CSAT surveys has three tabs — Survey, Delivery and Languages — and no activity view. To check whether a recipient was already surveyed, use Export CSV in the page header (it covers the last 7/30/90/365 days or all time) or look at the contact’s record. The per-send communication and activity logs are visible to Atender staff only, so if the export does not explain the miss, raise it with support rather than hunting for a log screen you cannot reach.
No survey arrived, even well past the delay window
Four things to check, in order:
- The prevention window. Delivery → Prevention Window (days) allows one survey per recipient per N days; the shipped default is 90, and the field accepts 0–365 (0 turns the check off). A customer who contacted you three times in a week gets one survey, not three — that is the intended behavior, not a failure. Two things surprise people here: the window is keyed on the address the survey would be sent to, not on the contact, so someone reachable by both email and SMS can still be surveyed on the other channel inside the window; and there is no separate per-conversation cap — a second survey on the same conversation is blocked by this window, not by a lifetime rule.
- Quiet hours. A survey invitation is never sent outside 09:00–20:00 local time, and this applies to both SMS and email — the window is not SMS-only. A survey triggered outside it stays
pendingwith a scheduled send time, and a background job picks it up roughly every five minutes once the window opens. The two channels read different clocks: SMS uses the recipient’s own country, derived from the+dial code on the number, and does not defer at all when the number has no dial code or the country spans several zones (US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia, Kazakhstan). Email uses the timezone on the opening-hours rule for the conversation’s team, and does not defer when there is no team or no valid timezone. So an out-of-hours survey that went straight out is not necessarily a bug. - Demo-seeded conversations. Demo conversations are excluded from CSAT delivery by design. They don’t create a survey record and don’t send a Mailgun, SMS, or in-app invitation — so a “missing” survey on a demo conversation is expected.
- Unanswered phone or voice calls. Missed calls, IVR hang-ups, and queue abandons are skipped automatically because nobody handled the call. They don’t create a survey record or send a survey invitation — so a missing survey on an unanswered call is expected. If the team followed up in writing, normal CSAT eligibility applies to that follow-up conversation.
When validating delivery, always use a real non-demo test conversation and contact. Mark the conversation Done, wait for the configured delay (or temporarily set the delay to 1 minute for testing), and confirm the survey arrives via the configured channel(s).
Survey arrives in English even though the conversation was in another language
No translation exists for that language, so the survey falls back to English. Add a translation for the conversation’s language in the survey’s Languages tab. See Localize CSAT surveys for the full flow.
Survey gets sent on conversations that should be excluded
If internal test conversations or spam follow-ups are receiving surveys, the resolution trigger is too broad — it fires on every qualifying resolution. Switch from the resolution trigger to an automation rule with the Send CSAT survey action and add conditions, so only qualifying conversations get surveys. See the CSAT-after-resolution automation recipe.