Nationwide Building Society and Portrait win prestigious Aberdeen Group Award for Customer Intelligence

Business Wire, April 13, 2006

BOSTON -- Leading U.K. financial services provider with 11 million customers records measurable improvement in quality and profitability of customer interactions

Portrait Software, a leader in Customer Interaction Optimization, today announces that Nationwide Building Society has been named a winner of Aberdeen Group's influential International Success Strategy Award for 2006. The award and corresponding report benchmarks customer intelligence success strategies, highlighting how best-in-class companies manage, analyze and apply customer data to profitably grow their businesses.

Nationwide was selected as an exemplary practitioner of Customer Intelligence Management based on their successful implementation of the Portrait Customer Interaction Management suite.

Join Aberdeen Group's webinar for more insight on Nationwide's success strategy. See details below.

Using Portrait Software's comprehensive Customer Interaction Management suite to manage day-to-day customer transactions, Nationwide is able to:

--Deliver a single, 360-degree view of the customer to the point of interaction

--Improve customer experience across all interaction channels

--Increase customer acquisition and retention rates

--Boost up-sell, cross-sell and sales conversion rates

--Increase new sales while decreasing outbound campaign costs

The Portrait system is used by all customer facing employees to support more than 11 million customers and millions of interactions each year. Thousands of callers each day receive personalized product or service offers from employees using Portrait.

"We are delighted that Aberdeen has selected Nationwide for demonstrating excellence in the way we capture, analyze and apply customer intelligence," said Simon Baines Head of Customer Insight at Nationwide. "Using Portrait we are delivering more sales and service messages than we did before, at a marginal cost of zero. These highly personalized messages are typically ten times more effective than traditional direct mail resulting in conversion rates of over 30% on some campaigns."

Customer-centric transition

The Portrait suite is used to deliver a 360-degree view of the customer to the point of interaction, with intelligent prompts pushed to teller screens, call center agents and web pages. The prompts include:

--Sales prompts - for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities

--Service prompts - to improve customer retention

--Data gathering prompts - to enrich customer intelligence

As the Aberdeen Group report notes, "With real-time analytics, automated customer behavior models (for churn risk, propensity to buy, offer ROI) are used to recommend the best possible, customer-centric action to take in each interaction - including cross-selling, special offers or service initiatives."

The Nationwide deployment of Portrait's intelligent prompts was the inspiration for Portrait Software's latest offering, Interaction Optimizer, which delivers real-time customer insight and predictive models to the point of interaction in any CRM environment.

Aberdeen Webinar

Aberdeen Group will be hosting a webinar on the power of Real-time Customer Intelligence at the Point of Interaction on Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 2PM EDT

Join Leslie Ament, Director of Customer Intelligence Research at the AberdeenGroup to learn how Success Strategy Award Winners, like Nationwide Building Society are applying their customer intelligence and CRM strategies to boost revenues by more than 30%, reduce operational costs and increase customer retention rates.

Sign up for the event at http://www.portraitsoftware.com/customer_intelligence_webinar

About Portrait Software

Portrait Software specializes in Customer Interaction Optimization software that helps organizations build more responsive, long-term and profitable customer relationships. Portrait Software's solutions combine analytical capabilities with a process-centric Customer Interaction Management platform, providing organizations with the ability to deliver the most highly optimized customer interactions across all sales and service channels.

Our 200 customers are organizations that lead the world's most demanding customer-intensive sectors, including Financial Services, Public Services, Telecoms and the Independent Software Vendors that support these markets. Customers include Nationwide Building Society, Lloyds TSB, Chelsea Building Society, British Telecom, Mapfre (Spain), NovaKBM (Slovenia), Wells Fargo Bank, Fidelity Investments, Washington Mutual, Merrill Lynch, T-Mobile, Fiserv CBS and the largest police force in Europe. For more information please visit: www.portraitsoftware.com

About AberdeenGroup

AberdeenGroup, Inc. provides fact-based research and insights focused on the global, technology-driven value chain. Aberdeen's benchmarking, market and solution assessments, sales acceleration programs, and conferences support Global 5000 value chain and technology executives -- and the solution providers who serve them. For more information, visit www.aberdeen.com, email press.room@aberdeen.com or call 617-723-7890.