Predictive Customer Analytics and Real-Time Business Intelligence

Customers should be at the heart of any business. In order to improve processes with customer interaction, businesses have introduced customer relationship management systems. These systems collect large volumes of data about customers which contain valuable information that can allow a business to improve its customer relationships and services. Typically, customer analytics focus on reporting what has happened. However, in order to become pro-active and truly shape the future of a business, it is important to predict what customers want and how they will react. In addition to understanding customers, it is paramount for any enterprise to understand how its business has performed at any given time in the past, now, and in the future. Business Intelligence applications available today focus very much on past performance. However, it is becoming essential that not only is the analysis of business performance done on real-time data, but also actions in response to analysis results can be performed in real time and instantaneously change business process parameters.