Before comparing customer intelligence to CRM, we need some common understanding for CRM.  According to internet sources, there are over 100 definitions and 82 million entries for the term “Customer Relationship Management” or CRM.   These break down into a number of key definition buckets depending on the viewpoint:

• For many marketing professionals, CRM can mean direct marketing, campaign management, analytics, loyalty programs or segmentation about customers.
• For enlightened CMOs, it can mean the entire PROCESS of managing the relationship with the customers, a process with many facets, not something that you can simply buy, or even something that can be completed in a single pass.
• For IT professionals, it can mean systems such as data warehouses, call centers, billing applications or sales force automation tools.  Or it might mean tools selection for business intelligence, ETL or analytics. 
• To the CFO, CRM usually portends unnecessary high costs which cannot be directly linked to an increase in the bottom line.
• For many CEOs, it means all of the above – although CRM seems essential for running the day-to-day operations, somehow it remains difficult to quantify the results.

No matter what the definition, there seem to be only two statuses for CRM: either it has been done but has not generated measurable new business, or it is "still being implemented" and not yet able to generate measurable new business – and this in perpetuity.

The production of customer intelligence taps into and adds value back to the CRM investments, first as data source for creating new business insights around the customer and second, as part of the infrastructure needed to act on that new intelligence.    The CIAgenda^® ensures that only those pieces of the CRM investment relevant to resolving the identified issues are used: a surprising advantage of using a CustomCIAgenda^® alongside your CRM is that it will identify which parts of the various CRM programs will bring most benefit to the company, as well as to establish milestones for delivering that value.