How Brand Monitoring Elevates Your CX

Brand monitoring involves keeping track of mentions, sentiment, and trends across channels to understand how customers view your brand. It helps you spot risks, gather feedback, and improve your reputation proactively. Having this kind of insight into how your current and ideal customers feel about your company ensures your CX strategies are always informed, targeted, and proactive.

After finishing this guide, you’ll know how brand monitoring benefits your company, its key features, what resources you’ll need to implement it, and how to actually do it.

Why Do You Need Brand Monitoring?

Here’s how implementing brand monitoring can help your brand.

It helps you understand customer perception

By analyzing mentions, reviews, and feedback across channels, you’ll get real-time clarity on how customers perceive your brand, products, and services. Are they happy with your product quality? Do they find your customer service lacking? What do they actually think about the new feature you just released?

If there are any perception gaps, brand monitoring shows you exactly where to focus to improve the overall experience with your company.

It simplifies the process of identifying pain points

Brand monitoring uncovers pain points by analyzing patterns in customer feedback like frequent complaints, negative sentiment spikes, or recurring issues across reviews and social mentions. Whether it’s a product flaw, slow response times, or unclear communication, these insights let you tackle problems before they snowball into bigger issues.

It simplifies crisis management

Is there a sudden surge in negative comments about a product defect? Has a social media post complaining about your products gone viral? Brand monitoring helps you quickly detect and respond to negative feedback or crises to protect your brand’s reputation, mitigate damage, and show customers that you’re committed to their satisfaction.

It helps you stay competitive

Brand monitoring lets you go beyond tracking mentions of your brand and conduct competitor brand analysis and market research. By analyzing competitors’ reviews, product launches, and customer sentiment, you can uncover gaps in their offerings or strategies that resonate with their audience.

Use these insights to benchmark your performance, identify emerging trends, and adapt to shifts in the market, keeping your brand one step ahead.

It helps enhance customer loyalty

Acting on the feedback you gather through brand monitoring shows customers that their voices matter. Whether it’s resolving complaints or implementing suggestions, this responsiveness builds trust and strengthens loyalty over time.

Key Functions of Brand Monitoring

Here’s how brand monitoring works to deliver those results and how it fits into CX.

Sentiment analysis

Analyzing customer sentiment across social media, reviews, and feedback channels gives you a clear view of your brand health in real time. It highlights patterns in tone — whether positive or negative — so you can address concerns or reinforce what’s working well.

How it fits into CX

When you know how customers really feel about your brand, you can tailor communications and experiences to their preferences and needs. This lets you maintain a strong brand reputation and ensures your messaging resonates with your customers.

Feedback aggregation

Brand monitoring combines feedback from every touchpoint — calls, emails, surveys, and social media — into one cohesive view. This gives you a more holistic view of what customers think about you and how you can prioritize the issues that matter most.

For example, feedback might show that customers see your pricing as too high compared to competitors. This can help you decide whether to adjust prices or better highlight the value you provide.

How it fits into CX

Having all your customer feedback in one place makes sharing data with CX teams easier. This means they can quickly act on insights, improve customer interactions, and address recurring issues more effectively.

Trend detection

By analyzing feedback, reviews, and online discussions, brand monitoring helps you identify customer expectations, industry trends, and competitor strategies faster than you could through traditional methods. It also reveals how people talk about your industry, helping you stay updated on topics that could affect your brand.

How it fits into CX

This early visibility helps CX teams anticipate changes and align their strategies accordingly so they can adapt offerings, refine customer journeys, and stay relevant before competitors catch up. Detecting trends also ensures CX teams focus on proactive solutions rather than reacting to shifts too late.

Proactive engagement

By tracking mentions and feedback, you can identify opportunities to resolve issues, answer questions, or thank customers for their support. It also helps you join relevant conversations, ensuring your brand stays visible and connected to its audience.

How it fits into CX

Detecting issues like recurring complaints or rising dissatisfaction early lets your contact center and CX teams act before problems impact customer satisfaction.

This proactive approach minimizes churn and builds trust.

Resources You’ll Need for Brand Monitoring

To implement online brand monitoring well, you’ll need the right mix of people and technology working together.

People functions

Effective brand monitoring starts with the right team. Here are some ways to structure yours:

• Dedicate a team or individual: Assign someone to oversee brand monitoring activities, including analyzing feedback, spotting trends, and managing responses. This could be a CX manager, a social media specialist, or a dedicated analyst, depending on your resources.
• Align key teams: Ensure marketing, customer service, and product teams work together on monitoring insights. For example, marketing can adjust messaging, service teams can address complaints, and product teams can fix recurring issues flagged by feedback.
• Involve data experts if possible: Include team members who can analyze brand monitoring data and turn it into clear actions to improve customer experiences. They should identify key problems and recommend practical solutions that align with your goals.

Technological solutions

Technology makes brand monitoring scalable and efficient. Equip your team with tools that cover these areas:

• Social media tracking: Use social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite, Brandwatch, or Sprout Social to track sentiment, mentions, and trends across platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and LinkedIn. These tools help you stay on top of conversations impacting your brand.
• Customer feedback collection: Platforms like Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey simplify collecting and analyzing customer feedback through surveys, forms, or direct interactions. These solutions are great for gathering actionable insights quickly.
• Omnichannel monitoring: Leverage tools like Nextiva’s CXM platform to track and aggregate feedback across email, phone, social media, and web chat. A centralized solution ensures you get a complete view of customer sentiment at all times.

How to Create a Brand Monitoring Game Plan Step-By-Step

Every company approaches brand tracking in a slightly different way, depending on its goals, resources, and audience. Here are some essential steps to guide and inspire your strategy.

Step 1: Set clear objectives

Start by defining what you want to accomplish with brand monitoring. These are your core priorities. Are you trying to:

• Understand brand perception: For example, do you want to learn how customers feel about your brand? Are you trying to improve your brand image?
• Manage your company’s reputation: For instance, do you need to detect and respond to negative feedback quickly?
• Monitor competitors: Are you tracking their sales and marketing campaigns, reviews, or customer feedback to benchmark your performance?
• Improve customer satisfaction: Are you focused on identifying recurring issues to enhance the customer experience or improve customer engagement metrics?

Or is it a mix of some of the above?

Next, translate your priorities into clear, actionable objectives by:

• Making your objectives SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound): Clearly define what you’ll achieve and how you’ll measure it. An example of a SMART goal could be to increase brand mentions by 15% through influencer marketing initiatives over the next six months.
• Defining what success looks like for each priority: For example, if you’re focused on managing your company’s reputation, success could be defined as reducing negative mentions by a set percentage within a set period.
• Aligning them with your overall CXM strategy: This means connecting brand monitoring efforts to your broader customer experience goals. If reducing churn is a focus, use monitoring to identify and act on feedback tied to high drop-off points in the customer journey.

Step 2: Use multiple monitoring methods

To get a complete picture of your brand’s performance, use a mix of brand monitoring tools and techniques to track feedback, customer sentiment, and industry trends. Here’s how:

• Leverage social listening tools: Track brand name mentions, hashtags, and customer sentiment on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. Social listening helps you see what people are saying about your brand and spot trends that show what customers care about.
• Analyze customer interactions: Use AI tools to review call transcripts, chat logs, and emails. This makes it easier to spot recurring problems or patterns that could point to bigger issues.
• Track backlinks: Use backlink monitoring tools to see which websites are linking to yours. This helps you understand who’s referencing your brand, assess the quality of those links, and find opportunities to strengthen your online presence.
• Track competitor activity: Look at your competitors’ product launches, customer feedback, and campaigns. This can help you see what they’re doing well and where you can stand out.
• Stay updated on industry trends: Follow industry publications, forums, and influencers. This keeps you informed about changes in your market and helps you adjust your strategy when needed.
• Monitor review sites: Check customer feedback on Google Reviews, Yelp, Reddit, and industry-specific online forums. These platforms often reveal common issues or what customers love most about your brand, including things they might not feel like sharing with your company directly.

Step 3: Leverage automation and AI

Automation and AI tools simplify brand monitoring by handling repetitive tasks and analyzing massive amounts of data so you don’t miss anything important.

Here’s how to begin:

• Categorize and prioritize feedback: AI tools can automatically group customer feedback based on themes, sentiment, or urgency. For example, recurring complaints about a product defect can be flagged and sent to your CX team, ensuring critical issues are addressed first.
• Set up automated alerts: Use tools like Google Alerts or advanced monitoring platforms to automatically receive notifications about changes in sentiment surrounding your online presence or mentions of specific issues. If there’s a sudden surge of complaints about shipping delays, your team can act immediately to resolve the problem.
• Make data analysis faster and easier: AI can sift through large volumes of customer interactions like call transcripts, chat logs, and social media mentions, highlighting key trends or patterns so you don’t have to do it. This helps you quickly spot emerging problems or opportunities.

Pro tip: Monitor how AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude discuss your brand. Large language models base their output on online content, so this can show you what people think about your brand and highlight areas to improve your online presence.

Step 4: Engage proactively

Once you’ve gathered insights from brand monitoring, it’s time to act. Proactive engagement turns data into better customer experiences and stronger relationships. Here’s how to get started:

• Respond quickly to feedback: Use social media channels or your contact center to address customer concerns immediately if possible. Thank customers for positive mentions, apologize for mistakes, and offer solutions. Fast responses show customers you care.
• Share insights with your teams: Pass along what you’ve learned to marketing, product, and customer service teams. For example, marketers can adjust their strategies based on sentiment trends, and product teams can focus on fixing the top issues customers mention.
• Close the loop with customers: Let customers know how their feedback led to changes or improvements. For instance, if you resolved a complaint or updated a feature based on their input, share that news with them. Here’s an example from Asana:

Step 5: Measure and optimize

The final step is to track the results of your brand monitoring efforts and improve your approach over time. Here are some ways to do that:

• Check your metrics: Look at KPIs like customer satisfaction, sentiment trends, share of voice, or response times. Are customers happier? Are they talking about you more than they talk about your competitors? Are complaints being resolved faster? These numbers tell you what’s working.
• Adjust your approach: Regularly review your tools and methods. Are you covering all the channels customers use? Are there any gaps you can fix?
• Ask your team: Talk to the people using the data. Is it clear? Is anything missing? Use their feedback to make the process better.

How Nextiva Helps With Brand Monitoring

Brand monitoring helps you discover how your brand is perceived, keep tabs on recurring issues, and track competitor activity so you can improve customer experiences, protect your reputation, and boost brand awareness.

But you need a dedicated tool to do it well. Here’s how Nextiva helps:

• Combines voice, email, chat, and social media monitoring for a unified view of customer feedback
• Uses advanced analytics to monitor brand sentiment, trends, and recurring issues in real time
• Gives you access to AI-powered tools to analyze call transcripts and customer interactions and uncover tone and sentiment
• Makes it easier for your team to share insights and act on them collaboratively through its unified inbox
• Helps you manage all your reviews in one place to simplify review management

Nextiva’s social media management suite and reputation management software offer personalized omnichannel management, helping you build stronger customer relationships, improve response times, and enhance brand awareness — all from a single, easy-to-use platform.

But don’t take our word for it. Try Nextiva out for yourself today!