There are two versions of what customers think about your brand. One is what they tell you directly, in reviews on your own site, support tickets, comments on your own posts. The other is what they say when they're not talking to you at all: a comparison thread on a forum, an offhand mention in a "what I actually use" video, a complaint buried in a comment section that never got tagged.
The second version is usually more honest, because nobody's writing it for your benefit. It's also the version almost no brand actually tracks, because it doesn't show up anywhere with your name attached as a notification.
Why your own inbox is a biased sample
People who reach out directly skew toward two extremes: thrilled enough to say so, or upset enough to demand a response. The much larger group in the middle, mildly satisfied, mildly disappointed, quietly switched to a competitor, almost never generates a message to you. That middle group is also usually where the most useful, specific feedback lives, because it's not clouded by strong emotion in either direction.
Where the honest version actually lives
Third-party review sites, forum threads comparing options in your category, social posts and comments that never tag your handle, and creator content that mentions your product in passing, not as a sponsored post. None of it was written for you, which is exactly why it's worth reading. A customer explaining to a stranger why they switched brands will describe the real reason in a way a support ticket rarely does.
Turning it into something usable
Reading scattered mentions once, after a launch or when something feels off, catches the loud version of a problem, late. The more useful pattern is continuous: watching sentiment as it shifts, so a quiet, early version of a complaint gets caught while it's still cheap to act on, instead of after it's compounded into a real reputation problem.
This is a direct extension of the process in competitor signals, not competitor research, applied to your own brand instead of a competitor's. Hugo reads this wider, untagged conversation continuously, so what customers say about you when you're not in the room becomes visible instead of invisible.
The version of your brand customers describe to each other is usually more honest than the version they describe to you.