By now, your organization is good at gathering data. How could you not be in 2025? Every touchpoint you have with your customers generates usable data, much of which is stored in your CRM for analysis. (Helpful Hint: If you haven’t looked into the impacts of not keeping that data up to date, check out our FREE ebook, Protecting Your Business from the Data Decay Epidemic.) 

But is your CRM enough? 

You might be wondering what we mean by that. Because of course, we are fierce defenders of the CRM and its ability to support your business with meaningful information. 

Yet simply because you collect data in your CRM doesn’t automatically mean that it’s used effectively. And the standard CRM data—name, phone number, contact data, the last time they opened your emails—isn’t quite enough to create the customer-obsessed culture you need in order to succeed. 

Let’s dig in. 

Reaping the Right Benefits from Customer Data

Both successful and unsuccessful companies do many of the same things initially. They collect sales and service data, and believe (not incorrectly, either) that tracking sales and service interactions provides insight into what customers think, want, and do. 

And they’re not wrong. 

The problem occurs when they stop there. 

Because here’s the thing: Customer data is no longer limited just to contact, sales, and service data. It now includes product usage data and even social media data—comments your users are making about your products on third-party spaces. 

So when it comes to being a customer-obsessed organization, it’s about having a data quantity advantage. 

But that’s not all it’s about. Because if you have quantity without quality, you’ve got a whole mess of data on your hands that tells you nothing—or at least nothing worthwhile. 

Which draws the conclusion that in order to do beneficial things with your customer data, you have to have not only the right type of data, but the right quantity and quality as well. 

The Customer-Obsessed Difference

So what exactly is it that customer-obsessed organizations do differently? Here are the three major things: 

1. They continuously collect and analyze enormous amounts of customer data. This includes data on sales transactions, service interactions, website and mobile app, product usage, and comments on external websites. It’s all important to them because it provides a deeper, more complex (and more accurate) picture of customer sentiment, need, and want. 
2. They use AI and machine learning to uncover customer insights. This means analyzing conversation recordings, reviewing social media and review site comments, and using metadata, the digital information that describes digital data. 
3. They get valuable insights by analyzing immense amounts of customer data. This is where they uncover insights on both necessary and desired product enhancements and extensions. 

Doing these three things is then reflected in revenue growth: Deeply customer-obsessed organizations have experienced much higher revenue growth since 2020 than the businesses that are more ignorant or even indifferent to their customers’ needs and wants. And it all comes from collecting more data, creating more insights from that data, and using those insights to out-market, out-sell, out-service, and out-innovate their competition. 

Where Does CRM Factor In?

Lest you think that all this means that CRM data is no longer relevant, that is absolutely not the case. Instead, think of this as a “yes, and.” YES, CRM data is still relevant, AND it needs to be utilized in concert with external data for the best and most complete picture of your customers. 

While collecting data from sales transactions, customer service interactions, and marketing interactions—all things that now are collected in your CRM—used to be cutting edge and revelatory, it’s now table stakes. Companies around the world have invested significantly in CRM—to the tune of over $100 billion in 2023—and yet customer satisfaction has only slightly increased since 2017. 

That’s not because of bad data. 

It’s because we need to use our data better. Reports are finding that companies struggle to use the data they collect, leaving a gap between collecting it and using it to improve things like sales, marketing, service, and product development. 

That’s not all CRM’s fault. And don’t think this is us saying that CRM is unimportant or not useful, because it is. Rather than being the end-all-be-all, however, CRM functions best for customer-obsessed organizations when it’s a critical piece of a much larger puzzle that includes data from external sources as well. 

Don’t Ignore Your CRM

Thus, while CRM is not enough on its own, you still need to keep focus on CRM data—accurate and timely collection, and continuous updating to prevent data decay. 

The good news is that it’s even easier to keep your CRM data up to date with the latest customer information, and you don’t even have to be in your CRM to do so. Because let’s be real: Where do you get most of your lead, prospect, and customer updates? In your inbox. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could update your CRM data right from there, then? 

Guess what, you can. With purpose-built integration from CloudExtend that connects your Outlook or Gmail inbox to your CRM, you can automatically create, edit, and even delete contact records in NetSuite. You can set email messages to connect to contact records automatically by email thread or address. You can sync calendar events bi-directionally between your email calendars and your NetSuite CRM. All that to easily break down the information silos that keep your customer information from being helpful in the big-picture of your org becoming customer-obsessed. 

Put your business on the road to customer-obsession with the base layer support of instantly updated and accurate information and deep communication visibility through inbox integration. Give it a try FREE for fourteen days with no obligation.