When Dutch financial services group APG tried to understand better why clients rang up its call centre, they noticed a small group taking up a lot of time: a high number of divorcees had been calling in the run-up to their legal separation, asking an expert to explain the intricacies of pension entitlements.

This was unwelcome news for APG: each call cost an average of €13 and it already had a website which it thought was tailored to clients, so calls were unnecessary. “We were trying to find out: why do people need to call three or four times, in some cases even more?” says Rachid El Hasnaoui, a business intelligence specialist at APG.

The solution, he says, was to employ “process mining”, an emerging field in big data analytics that is helping some of the world’s biggest companies — including GM, Airbus, KPMG and UBS — to automate tasks and adapt to the digitisation of industry.