You're only hearing from 10% of your customers

and you are 100% missing the most important things (HOW TO FIX)

Hi Team!

The sun is shining, flowers are blooming, seasonal depression is nearly gone, and Noah is almost 5 YEARS OLD???

Where did the time go?

Something I’ve been thinking about since watching Noah start to communicate what he actually thinks: the gap between what people say directly to you and what they say when you’re not in the room.

Your CX team has gotten really good at one thing: managing what comes through the inbox.

Tickets are tagged, response times are solid, and AI handles the easy stuff. But the feedback that doesn’t come through support is growing way faster than the feedback that does.

Customers are posting about your product on TikTok, comparing you in Reddit threads, and leaving reviews explaining exactly why they switched.

None of that shows up in Zendesk. You optimized the speed at which you respond to a shrinking percentage of actual customer sentiment.

This week, I want to talk about why most brands are operationally faster but strategically blind, and what it actually looks like to build a feedback system that sees the whole picture.

Let’s dive in.

This week’s newsie is brought to you by Syncly.

Your CX team is fast. But fast at what? Managing the 10% of feedback that actually reaches your inbox.

Syncly was built to close that exact gap.

It pulls in feedback from support tickets, product reviews, and social channels into one place where you can actually search, ask questions, and spot patterns without spending a week pulling exports.

Here’s what stood out to me:

1️⃣ Ask it like you’d ask ChatGPT: Type “what are customers saying about our new product?” and get actual answers backed by real customer quotes. No dashboards to configure. No reports to wait for.

2️⃣ It sees what your helpdesk can’t: The whole point is that it goes beyond tickets. Amazon reviews, TikTok comments, Reddit threads — the places your customers talk when they’re not talking to you. That’s where the real signal lives.

3️⃣ You find the problem before it becomes a ticket: Real-time alerts on sentiment shifts mean you can catch issues while they’re still a Reddit thread, not after they’ve become 200 angry emails.

Brands like Fenty Beauty, Kosas, Neuro, Hum Nutrition, Needed, Organika, Banza, and Adidas are already using Syncly to turn scattered feedback into decisions they actually feel confident making.

If your CX stack only sees what customers say to you, you’re missing the bigger picture. Syncly shows you what they’re saying about you.

Book a demo with their co-founders to get a free demo with your own data.

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Think about how you actually behave as a consumer

When a product disappoints you, most people don’t open a support ticket. Sometimes they do, maybe, if the issue is transactional: wrong item, missing package, billing error. You need a resolution, and only the brand can give it to you.

When the issue is qualitative, the formula changed, the fit is off, the experience wasn’t what you expected, most people don’t email support. They post about it, leave a review, reply to someone else’s comment, and vent in a subreddit all in the same week.

The volume of external feedback is outpacing ticket volume by multiples, and the gap keeps growing.

Your customer just spent 11 minutes explaining why your product sucks in a Reddit thread with 400 upvotes. You’re still waiting for them to email you.

Side note: At OLIPOP when we shifted from more than 50% ecom in peak COVID to mostly retail in 2022. We saw almost 0 customer complaints from retail, for the same products that had tickets coming in on ecom.

This hits omnichannel brands even harder.

What seeing everything actually looks like

The shift is structural. It’s about whether your feedback infrastructure treats support tickets as the only input, or as one input among many. When you can pull in reviews, social comments, and community discussions alongside your ticket data, a few things change, and they compound over time.

• You stop reacting and start anticipating: A sentiment shift on Amazon reviews often precedes a spike in support tickets by weeks. If you can see that shift in real time, you can act before it compounds.

• You stop guessing what customers actually care about: Internal teams spend hours debating what language to use, what features to prioritize, what’s driving churn, while customers have already explained it in a TikTok comment thread or a subreddit you didn’t know existed. If you’re not watching those channels, you’re making product decisions based on incomplete data.

• You stop optimizing for the wrong problems: Some issues generate many tickets but don’t affect retention, while others generate none but drive silent churn at scale.

If you can only see ticket volume, you’re allocating resources based on noise, not impact. You’re fixing the loud thing, not the thing that matters.

The uncomfortable reality

If a creator with half a million followers posted a negative video about your product tomorrow, how long would it take your team to know about it. If the answer is “when someone on the team happens to see it,” you have a blind spot that no amount of ticket automation can fix.

You’ve built a system that’s soooo good at handling customers who reach out, but completely useless for customers who don’t.

That’s most of them, by the way. The majority of dissatisfied customers never open a ticket. They just stop buying, and maybe they tell a few thousand people why on the way out.

The brands winning retention in 2026 aren’t faster at support. They figured out how to listen everywhere. They treat social mentions, review sentiment, and community discussions as first-class inputs, not nice-to-haves.

They can spot a product issue in a Reddit thread before it becomes a return trend. They know when a TikTok creator’s review is about to drive a spike in new customer sentiment. They’re not reacting to problems after they hit the inbox. They’re seeing them form in real time and deciding whether to act, adjust, or ignore based on actual signal, not gut feel.

Your ticket volume is a lagging indicator. Everything happening outside your inbox is a leading one, and right now, most brands are flying blind to the signals that actually matter.

Start with one channel this week

This isn’t about hiring a social listening team or adding another dashboard to your stack. It’s about rethinking what “customer feedback” actually means in 2026. Support tickets are one input, a valuable one, but if that’s the only channel you’re watching, you’re optimizing a shrinking slice of the conversation.

Pick one place your customers talk about you that isn’t your inbox. Reddit, TikTok comments, Amazon reviews, whatever. Spend 30 minutes reading through it. Not to respond, just to see what they’re actually saying when you’re not in the room.

You’ll find something your team has been debating for months already solved in a comment thread, or a complaint you didn’t know existed showing up 50 times in slightly different words.

The brands that win will be the ones who can see the full picture: what customers say to them and what they say about them. That’s the job now. Everything else is just speed.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?

Just shoot me a DM or an email!

Cheers,

Eli 💛

P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.