By Aditi Chandrasekar – Consumers have grown more and more immune to ads that don’t target them. After a day spent searching for short story competitions on Google, a scroll through your Instagram feed will reveal ads for writing contests taking place near you. This is because companies are using increasingly intelligent systems to understand their customers and curate highly specific messages for them. This comes under the ambit of ‘Business intelligence’, a term that became widespread only in 1989. This relatively new concept refers to a bunch of software and services that take raw data and turn it into relevant insight that reflects a company’s performance. Using the graphs, maps, and charts that these software generate, better business decisions are made to improve internal workflow, understand competitors better, provide more personalised services to customers etc.

Big changes take place in most industries everyday, so it’s necessary for companies to stay one step ahead, in order to remain competitive. One German service provider, Verastel faced intense price pressure and growing competition a few years ago, before turning to business intelligence. An issue that was uncovered was that their customers hated having to deal with an outsourced call center for support. So, the first order of the day was to bring customer support in-house. This simple decision skyrocketed their customer renewal rates, quickly making Versatel one of the leading providers of data, internet and voice services in Germany, which was in blatant contrast to being barely able to keep their heads above water just a couple of years prior. Read On: