Realizing the limitations of focus groups and similar marketing practices, companies decided that they needed to know more about who were their customers, how they interacted with the company, and how the company could reach out to customers in a meaningful way. This idea of getting a "360-degree view" of customers was a nice concept, but it was never really achievable within the limited spectrum of marketing and communication tools that were available.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was designed to try to pull together information from various systems to provide an idea of not only whether a customer had interacted with your business, but what kind of interaction occurred, who was involved in the interaction, and what it meant to the company. Unfortunately, most companies could get only limited answers to these questions: whether a customer had bought a company product or ever called in with a question or comment, and whether his or her current contact information was valid.