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?

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.

Reaping the Right Benefits from Customer Data

Both successful and unsuccessful companies collect sales and service data, and they believe that tracking these interactions provides insight into what customers think, want, and do. And they’re not wrong.

The problem occurs when they stop there. Customer data is no longer limited just to contact, sales, and service data. It now includes product usage data and even social media data. When it comes to being a customer-obsessed organization, it’s about having a data quantity advantage.

However, you must have quantity with quality. 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?

1. They continuously collect and analyze enormous amounts of customer data. This includes data on sales transactions, service interactions, website/mobile app usage, product usage, and comments on external websites. This provides a deeper, more complex, and more accurate picture of customer sentiment.
2. They use AI and machine learning to uncover customer insights. This means analyzing conversation recordings, reviewing social media/review site comments, and leveraging metadata to find patterns the human eye misses.
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 reflected in revenue growth: Deeply customer-obsessed organizations have experienced much higher revenue growth because they use these insights to out-market, out-sell, and out-innovate their competition.

Where Does CRM Factor In? The “Yes, And…” Approach

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 sales, service, and marketing interactions—all things now collected in your CRM—used to be cutting edge, it’s now table stakes. Companies struggle to use the data they collect, leaving a gap between collecting it and using it to improve sales, marketing, and service.

Rather than being the end-all-be-all, CRM functions best for customer-obsessed organizations when it’s a critical piece of a much larger puzzle that includes data from external sources.

Don’t Ignore Your CRM: Seamless Inbox Integration

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

The good news is that it’s 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. Where do you get most of your lead, prospect, and customer updates? In your inbox.

With purpose-built integration from CloudExtend that connects your Outlook or Gmail inbox to your CRM (such as NetSuite), you can:

• Automatically create, edit, and delete contact records in NetSuite right from your inbox.
• Set email messages to connect to contact records automatically by email thread or address.
• Sync calendar events bi-directionally between your email calendars and your NetSuite CRM.

All this works to easily break down the information silos that keep your customer information from being helpful in the big-picture of your organization 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.