What is sentiment analysis? Understanding its role in IT support

Sentiment analysis is about using data and AI to understand the emotional tone behind a body of text. For IT help desks, this is a crucial component of delivering exceptional support. 

Why does sentiment analysis matter? In the context of an IT support team, analyzing user interactions allows you to gauge frustration levels, identify recurring issues, and prioritize responses according to urgency. 

Instead of waiting for complaints to bubble up, sentiment analysis enables help desks to identify when users are frustrated or angry and proactively address these negative sentiments before they escalate.

Let’s dig into what sentiment analysis is, how it works, and why it’s quickly becoming a must-have tool for IT support teams.

What is sentiment analysis?

So, what is sentiment analysis? It’s the process of analyzing digital text to determine if the message's emotional tone is positive, negative, or neutral based on the specific words or phrases used. Think about  emails, support tickets, chat logs, and survey responses. Is the user happy, neutral, or completely fed up? Sentiment analysis helps you find out.

Also known as opinion mining, it’s a technique that blends three essential technologies: natural language processing (NLP), text analysis, and computational linguistics. 

NLP helps computers understand and interpret human language, while text analysis extracts meaningful insights from written data. Finally, computational linguistics then uses models and algorithms to analyze text and speech. Together, they give you a snapshot of a user’s mood and sentiment. 

IT help desks can significantly improve their processes and service levels by understanding these sentiments so the IT team can respond in an empathetic and appropriate way relative to the user’s mood.

Use cases for sentiment analysis in IT support

Sentiment analysis is increasingly becoming a key tool for IT support teams since it enhances their ability to respond to users and address their exact needs. 

Here are some real-world ways sentiment analysis is making IT support smarter and more responsive.

IT help desk and support ticket analysis

IT help desk teams can use sentiment analysis to inspect support ticket language and flag signs of frustration or dissatisfaction — before things escalate. If it finds words that point to frustration or dissatisfaction, they can investigate and resolve the root causes. 

Let’s say a user writes:

“I’ve submitted this ticket three times and still no fix. This is ridiculous.”

That’s a red flag. A sentiment-aware system can bump it to the top of the queue so an agent can respond ASAP.

Big companies are already doing this. For example, T-Mobile partnered with OpenAI to build IntentCX, a platform that uses sentiment data to triage and handle customer issues more efficiently.

Chatbot and AI-powered support enhancements

Chatbots can get a bad rap. But when paired with sentiment analysis, they get a lot smarter — and more human. Insights from sentiment analysis can help chatbots tailor their responses accordingly to the user’s tone and mood.

If a chatbot senses growing user frustration, it can automatically escalate the conversation to a live agent. Commonwealth Bank of Australia did just that with its “Hey CommBank” bot, which adapts its advice based on emotional tone.

User feedback and survey analysis

With sentiment analysis, you can go beyond customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, which rely on users to manually answer questions. Sentiment analysis helps you process huge volumes of feedback to detect trends, and summarize overall sentiment of users’ interactions with your IT service desk – fast.  For example, last year, Yelp introduced AI-powered "Review Insights" to enhance user experience by summarizing customer sentiments on food quality, service, and ambiance. 

These insights helped them understand large volumes of feedback and gave other users a quick snapshot of the group sentiment.

You can do the same for your help desk feedback.

Benefits of sentiment analysis in IT support

For IT support teams, sentiment analysis goes far beyond traditional ticket tracking. A deep understanding of user sentiment allows these help desks to respond effectively to issues and uncover pain points quickly. 

Here are three key ways that IT help desks will benefit from sentiment analysis:

• Proactive issue resolution – Pick up on negative sentiment early and resolve issues before they turn into complaints. Automated sentiment tracking helps prioritize critical tickets, so agents can focus on urgent issues first. 
• Enhanced user experience – Sentiment data helps agents respond with more empathy and tailor their interactions when needed. Users notice. For example, if someone says, “I’ve been dealing with this for days,” your team can shift their tone to acknowledge the user’s frustration.
• Data-driven decision-making – By aggregating sentiment trends across tickets, chats, and surveys, IT leaders can spot what’s working — and what’s not. For example, if the system identifies multiple tickets that mention slow VPN connections (from phrases like “always disconnecting” or “unreliable”), the IT team can investigate the VPN infrastructure.

Challenges of implementing sentiment analysis

Of course, sentiment analysis isn’t magic. While it can give IT teams valuable insights it also comes with a few speed bumps.

Here are three key challenges to consider:

• Language nuances – Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t great at idiomatic expressions or sarcasm (yet). “Oh great, another outage” might get flagged as positive. You’ll need human oversight to catch these subtleties. 
• Messy data – The accuracy of sentiment analysis depends on data quality. Bad data leads to bad insights. Inconsistent formatting, vague messages, or poor grammar can trip up the system and result in unreliable sentiment assessments.​ Training your model on clean, labeled data is key.
• Integration complexity – Integrating sentiment analysis into your existing IT support systems requires careful planning. It needs to sync with your ticketing platform, chatbot, reporting tools, and more. Without proper planning, integration issues can occur.

Bottom line? Relying only on machines and systems isn’t enough. Sentiment analysis works best when it's paired with real human expertise — just like everything in IT. 

Integrating sentiment analysis into your IT support

Sentiment analysis has become a key tool for IT help desks, transforming how they understand and respond to user feedback. By using the power of AI and data-driven insights, IT teams can proactively pick up on user frustration, prioritize urgent issues, and enhance the overall user experience. 

However, incorporating sentiment analysis into an IT help desk can present challenges. Luckily, we can help.

At Fixify, we have years of experience integrating sentiment analysis into IT support teams. We analyze the user sentiment in every ticket and even show you how sentiment changes while the ticket is being worked.

Book a demo today to better understand your users' emotions and needs and become a trusted IT help desk.