Localize CSAT surveys

Translating CSAT surveys is one of the highest-leverage response-rate improvements available. Customers ignore English surveys when they wrote in. Translated surveys respond.

Before you start

• Admin permissions on CSAT settings
• The survey already configured (see Configure and deliver a CSAT survey)
• The languages your team handles configured in Settings → Markets and Languages
• Translated copy ready (translator, in-house, or AI-assisted with review)

Steps

1. Open Settings → CSAT Surveys.
2. Open the survey.
3. Click the Languages tab.
4. Click Add language and pick from the languages enabled for your tenant.
5. Translate the questions and email/SMS template copy for each version:
   Question text (every question)
   Conditional follow-up prompts (e.g. “What could we improve?”)
   Email subject line
   Email body framing
   SMS body
   “Thank you” confirmation page or message
6. Save. Repeat for each language.

What gets shared and what doesn’t

• Question text and conditional prompts — ✓ —
• Email subject and body — ✓ —
• SMS body — ✓ —
• In-app survey wording — ✓ —
• Question types (rating / NPS / open-ended) — — ✓
• Question order — — ✓
• Rating scale (1–5, 1–10, etc.) — — ✓
• Frequency caps and timing rules — — ✓

So a structural change (add a question, change the rating scale) ripples to every language version. A wording change (rephrase a question) affects only the language you change.

Language selection at delivery time

When the survey is sent, the language is picked one of two ways:

• Match the inbox language — uses the language attached to the channel the conversation came in on. The default and almost always the right choice.
• Match the contact’s preferred language — falls back to the contact profile if their preferred language differs from the inbox language they used.

Both fall back to the survey’s default language (typically English) when no translation matches.

Don’t trust machine translation alone

For CSAT surveys specifically, machine translation often misses important nuance:

• “How likely are you to recommend us?” in English is conventional; some literal translations come out clinical or overly formal.
• “Stars” is a universal symbol but the supporting text varies — “How would you rate your experience?” reads naturally in some languages but stilted in others.
• “Tell us more” implies friendliness that hard literals often lose.

Have a native speaker review (or write) the translations before going live. CSAT response quality is sensitive to wording in a way that other product copy isn’t.

Verify it worked

Pick a test conversation in a non-default language:

1. Mark the conversation Done (or trigger the survey via automation).
2. Within the configured delay, the survey arrives in the conversation’s language.
3. Submit a response.
4. The response appears in Analytics the same way as the default-language version — analytics aggregates across languages.

What to translate first if you’re starting from scratch

If your team handles many languages, prioritize by volume:

1. Top language by inbox volume (often a non-English regional language for European tenants — Norwegian, Swedish, German, French)
2. English (covers the long tail of customers who switch to English)
3. The next 1-2 highest-volume languages
4. Stop. Adding language versions for languages you serve <5% of conversations in is rarely worth the maintenance.

Maintenance

Translations drift. When you change wording in the default language, the other languages stay stale until updated. A few practices:

• Note the date in each language version’s description field.
• Re-review every quarter, especially after major wording changes.
• Have a fallback policy — when a language’s translation is more than 6 months stale, fall back to the default rather than serving outdated copy.

See also

• What are CSAT Surveys?
• Markets and Languages
• Auto-Translation — for translating customer messages, not surveys