Thanks to the Internet, customers are better informed, more networked and flexible, and thus more powerful than ever before. Their demands are constantly growing and changing. At the same time, competitors are also better informed and more flexible, and competitive pressure in the market is increasing. Consequently, well-working customer relationship management (CRM) is becoming a critical source of competitive advantage (Band 2013). There are several far-reaching trends in CRM (Band 2013). There is social CRM and mobile CRM. There is also business process management (BPM), which already is well-established in many areas and is playing an increasing role in CRM – to fix today’s inefficiencies and disconnections in many CRM processes, and because business processes need to be improved and adapted more quickly. Analytical CRM is also gaining importance because it is the key to obtaining valuable knowledge about customers. Finally yet importantly, customer feedback management is finding its way into more organizations. Between 2011 and 2012, the proportion of companies using voice of the customer programs has risen from 55 to 68 percent, clearly driving retention and growth (Band 2013). In spite of the general acceptance of the CRM idea, many CRM processes are far from optimal today (Band 2013; Thompson 2013). In theory, they should be optimized continually using the latest knowledge generated from operational data with business intelligence (BI) (Wilde 2010). Important starting points of such an optimization are the decision points in the processes. Continually optimizing the decision logic in these decision points with targeted BI support results in intelligent business processes (Hill 2012; Kemsley 2013). The literature has not yet examined this topic in detail and in its entirety. For this reason, we will investigate the state of the art of intelligent business processes in CRM systematically in the first part of the study (Sect. 2). In particular, we will explain the conceptual framework of intelligent business processes in CRM and identify options for implementation. Generally, such intelligent business processes are deployable in all areas of CRM. A particularly important CRM subprocess is complaint management because a complaint implies an actual hazard to a customer relationship – the essential CRM object – and represents an excellent opportunity to strengthen customer retention by offering a solution (Stauss and Seidel 2007). Stauss and Seidel (2004) even refer to complaint management as the ‘‘heart of CRM.’’ In practice, however, complaint management is often neither effective nor efficient (Gu¨nter 2012). This is because it lacks basics – the effect of companies’ complaint-handling activities on the customer relationship is widely unexplored (Davidow 2003; Orsingher et al. 2010). For example, how do the type and amount of a compensation affect repurchase intentions (Grewal et al. 2008)? As long as such relationships are unknown, organizations cannot improve their processes and customers are left unsatisfied. With BI, an organization could analyze such relationships and their relevant variables continually and align the decisions in the complaint management processes with them. In theory, a promising field of application for intelligent business processes can be opened up here.