How angry are your customers? Sentiment analysis of support tickets that escalate

Software support ticket escalations can be an extremely costly burden for software organizations all over the world. Consequently, there exists an interest in researching how to better enable support analysts to handle such escalations. In order to do so, we need to develop tools to reliably predict if, and when, a support ticket becomes a candidate for escalation. This paper explores the use of sentiment analysis tools on customer-support analyst conversations to find indicators of when a particular support ticket may be escalated. The results of this research indicate a considerable difference in the sentiment between escalated support tickets and non-escalated support tickets. Thus, this preliminary research provides us with the necessary information to further investigate how we can reliably predict support ticket escalations, and subsequently to provide insight to support analysts to better enable them to handle support tickets that may be escalated.