HappySignals does not recommend using non-standard ways of asking the ratings from the end-users, such as coloring the buttons.
The question you should ask is, will changing colors in the rating buttons improve the experience of the service you provided to your end-user? Or are you just trying to affect the scores they are giving?
Our recommendation is not to color code or explain the scale. This is based on NPS best practices, and the key here is to request feedback in as neutral manner as possible, and to try not to influence the person giving feedback, but to get their true, unbiased sentiment out.
There are a lot of resources and studies on the subject, here are a few examples:
https://measuringu.com/coloring-responses/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-net-promoter-score-artificially-inflated-raghav-arora
https://www.surveysensum.com/blog/color-coding-nps-scale/
https://verstaresearch.com/blog/dont-color-code-your-nps-net-promoter-scale/
Our global benchmark is another reason why you shouldn't alter the scale. Results are not comparable to benchmarks if you ask for feedback in a different way from everybody else.
What we have seen with customers who have used color coding in the scale, is that it has not made any significant difference in the scores they're getting.
New scale of 0-10 helps
Earlier HappySignals was using a scale from 1-10. This caused some people to misinterpret the scale, e.g. in some countries, 1 is considered a positive score. We've since introduced 0 (zero) back to the scale. The score of zero is universally understood as a low score (and also less than 1), which has made it easier to understand what is good and what is not, even if the numbers are not colored.
But if you really want to still change it...
But if customers see that they want to use colors, they can do so. The change is done to HTML script of the email notification configuration in the ITSM tool. This change is not part of the HappySignals delivery.