CSAT Trend, Intercom

Daily positive-rating percentage from Intercom conversation_rating over a 90-day window, plotted as a line so you can see whether satisfaction is climbing or sliding. How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it.

Metrics type: Supporting Metrics • Category: Helpdesk / Customer support

Rolling daily CSAT (% of conversation ratings that are positive, 4-5★) charted across 90 days so you can read direction, not just a single snapshot.

At a glance

CSAT Trend is a customer-satisfaction metric tracked from your Intercom workspace. It takes the same positive-rating percentage that the headline CSAT gauge reports and stretches it across 90 days as a line, so you and the founder can see whether Blitz shoppers are getting happier or angrier week over week — well before a single bad month shows up in a board deck. A satisfaction score is only useful in motion: one quiet week of 92% means nothing next to a four-week slide from 92% to 81%. Pair it with the siblings below to turn a moving line into a root cause.

What it counts	The percentage of rated conversations scored positive (4 or 5 stars in Intercom’s conversation_rating object), computed per day and plotted across the window. Unrated conversations are excluded from the denominator — this is satisfaction among customers who chose to rate, not all customers.
Sample type	API-derived from the Intercom conversations endpoint. Each closed conversation may carry a conversation_rating with a rating (1-5), remark, and created_at; Vortex IQ buckets those by rating date and rolls them into a daily positive-share series.
Why it matters	A single CSAT number hides the story. The trend tells you whether a process change, a staffing gap, a shipping delay, or a product issue is steadily eroding goodwill. For Blitz — a sports retailer with seasonal demand spikes — catching a downward slope early lets you intervene before peak season amplifies it.
Reading the value	Read the slope, not the last dot. A flat line near your target is healthy; a sustained downslope is the signal. Overlay the alert (a >5-point week-over-week drop) and check whether the dip lines up with a volume spike, an SLA breach, or a specific agent’s coverage.
Currency	percent
Time window	90D
Alert trigger	drop >5pts WoW
Sentiment key	csat
Roles	owner, operations

Calculation

For each day in the 90-day window, Vortex IQ counts conversations whose conversation_rating.rating is 4 or 5 (positive) and divides by all conversations rated that day (rating 1-5). The daily series is plotted as a line; the week-over-week comparison that drives the alert compares the most recent 7-day positive share against the prior 7 days. Conversations with no rating never enter the calculation — see Rating Response Rate for how much of your volume is actually being scored.

Worked example

A representative reading of CSAT Trend for Blitz across a quarter. For ten weeks the line holds between 90% and 93% — comfortably above the 70% floor. In week eleven a carrier starts missing delivery windows on football boots; shoppers open conversations tagged delivery and where-is-my-order, and ratings on those threads come back at 2 and 3 stars. The daily line bends from 92% down to 85% over five days, and the week-over-week drop crosses the 5-point alert threshold. Because the slide is gradual, the headline CSAT gauge still reads “green-ish” at a glance — but the trend card has already flagged it. You cross-reference Top Topics (Tags), confirm delivery is spiking, and escalate to the carrier before the dip deepens into peak season. To trace the upstream cause, open Vortex Mind; to ask “which tags are dragging CSAT down this week?” in plain English, use Ask Viq.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Card	Why merchants reach for it
ic_csat_score	The headline gauge this line expands: the single positive-rating percentage for the current window.
ic_csat_by_agent	When the trend dips, break it down by agent to see whether the slide is broad or concentrated on one queue.
ic_negative_ratings	The actual 1-2★ conversations behind a falling line — read the remarks to find the cause.
ic_alert_csat_drop	The real-time alert twin: fires the moment a >5-point drop is detected so you do not have to watch the chart.
ic_top_tags	Correlate a CSAT slide with a rising topic (delivery, refunds, sizing) to pinpoint what changed.

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Intercom’s own dashboard:

In Intercom, open Reports → Customer satisfaction (or the legacy Conversation rating report). Set the date range to the last 90 days and view the satisfaction-over-time chart. The percentage there is Intercom’s “happy” share of ratings — the same positive (4-5★) numerator Vortex IQ uses. You can also spot-check individual ratings in the Inbox by filtering conversations on rating.

Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ:

Reason	Direction	What to do
Rating-date vs conversation-date bucketing. Vortex IQ buckets each rating by when it was submitted; some Intercom views bucket by when the conversation opened or closed.	Variable	Match the report’s “based on” date setting to rating submission date.
Positive-rating definition. Vortex IQ counts 4-5★ as positive; if your workspace uses a 3-point (good/ok/bad) scale or a custom mapping, the threshold may differ.	Variable	Confirm your rating scale and which scores count as positive.
Time zone. Intercom reports in the workspace time zone; Vortex IQ aligns to your merchant reporting time zone, so day boundaries can shift a rating between two days.	Marginal	Confirm time-zone match before chasing a one-day discrepancy.
Window edges. A rolling 90-day window and a calendar-quarter report will include slightly different conversations at the boundaries.	Marginal	Align the date range exactly.

Cross-connector reconciliation: when CSAT slides, complement this card with Median First-Response Time and First-Response SLA Attainment — slow replies are the most common upstream cause of falling satisfaction. For divergence investigations, use Vortex Mind.

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Q: How often does CSAT Trend update? The card refreshes on the standard data refresh (typically every 30-60 minutes). Because it is derived from rated conversations, the latest day fills in as ratings arrive — customers often rate hours or days after a conversation closes, so the most recent point can keep rising for a day or two.

Q: Why does my Intercom satisfaction report show a different number? The usual culprits are rating-date vs conversation-date bucketing, a different positive-rating threshold (3-point vs 5-point scale), and time-zone day boundaries. Match those three settings before assuming a real divergence.

Q: The line dropped but my CSAT gauge still looks fine — which is right? Both. The gauge is a single window-wide percentage that smooths out recent movement; the trend reveals the slope inside that window. A trend that is bending down while the gauge still reads acceptable is exactly the early-warning case this card exists for.

Q: Can I customise the alert threshold? Yes. The >5-point week-over-week drop is configurable per profile in the Alert Rules tab. If Blitz runs a noisier baseline during sale events, widen it to cut false positives.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

CSAT Trend is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Intercom and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English.

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