Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Support Professional or higher |
| Also required | Copilot |
| Access | Admin |
Using sentiment to reach unhappy customers before they escalate. Worth doing, with realistic expectations of the signal.
Set it up
- Create a view with a condition on the Sentiment field. There are five values, so decide whether you mean Negative alone or Very negative as well.
- Combine it with something else: still open, unassigned, or past a certain age.
- Give it to whoever handles escalations.
- Review after two weeks whether the tickets in it were the right ones.
Starting with very negative only is the smaller, sharper list, and it is the better first version: a view nobody can work through gets abandoned in a fortnight.
Sentiment alone is too noisy
Short factual messages get read as negative, and politely-worded fury gets read as neutral. A view on sentiment alone contains many calm tickets and misses some genuinely angry ones.
Combined with age, or with a topic where frustration matters, it becomes usable.
The strongest signal is change
A conversation that started neutral and turned negative is a better predictor than one that was negative from the first message. Somebody who wrote in annoyed is often direct; somebody who became annoyed during the exchange is losing patience with you.
Act quickly or not at all
A negative-sentiment view worked once a week is pointless, because by then the escalation has happened. Either somebody looks at it daily or the view should not exist.
What to do with one
A person, a reply, and a realistic commitment. Not an apology template, which reads as automated to somebody already unhappy, and which they will recognise as such.
Do not report on it as a quality measure
Negative sentiment tracks the subject more than the handling. Teams working refunds and outages will always show worse figures than teams answering how-to questions, and comparing them measures nothing.
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