Portrait Software Placed Among Top Five Winners of the DMA Analytics Challenge 2006 Competition

Portrait recognized for its superior capability to accurately model and predict customer response to a marketing promotion

DMA conference, San Francisco-CA, October 17, 2006. Portrait Software, a leader in optimizing customer interactions, scored in the top five winners of the Analytics Challenge 2006 competition sponsored by the DMA Analytics Council and CAC Group.   The award underscores that the Portrait-Quadstone software provides best-in-class customer analytics capabilities that can model and predict, with the highest level of accuracy, which customers are most likely to respond to a campaign promotion.  Portrait Software’s resource-efficient approach to customer analytics empowers businesses with the ability to respond to complex business problems efficiently and effectively.

Visit the Portrait Software booth # 407 at the DMA conference to see a demo of the award winning solution.

“Portrait’s ability to automate the modeling process and identify the most profitable customer segments in a few days stood out in stark contrast to the resource-intensive modeling approaches employed by other participants in the competition,” said Mark Smith, executive vice president, Portrait Software.  “Our placement among the top five is a great endorsement of the 12 year heritage of our analytic capabilities and the value we deliver to our customers.”

The objective of the DMA Analytics Challenge Award is to recognize companies that achieve superior performance in the area of analytics, as well as to facilitate the dissemination of new analytic techniques within the community.  Participants were each provided with a dataset including customer demographic, behavioral, and transactional data and were asked to build the best model for identifying responders to a customer promotion.  To determine the winners of the Challenge, a blind sample (not provided to participants) was scored using each participant’s model. 

Portrait’s customer analytic solutions have delivered quantifiable returns to many organizations world-wide, in particular large financial services, retail and telecommunications companies.  The winning formula for success in the DMA competition was superior software capabilities for: 

• Identifying significant customer behavior metrics direct from transaction history
• Automating the model building process to allow a deeper search of potential solutions
• Leveraging additive scorecard techniques which provide significant additional predictive power over more traditional regression approaches.

“Customer analytics empowers businesses to focus on customers, meet their demands, differentiate actions to them, anticipate their behaviour and respond quickly to market dynamics,” said Brad Rukstales, vice chair of The DMA Analytics Council and president of CAC Group.  “Portrait Software has demonstrated their strong customer analytic capabilities and we congratulate Portrait for emerging as one of the top winners of the very competitive DMA Analytics Challenge Award 2006.”

Portrait Software’s strong analytic software tools and services have enabled many leading financial, retail and telecom companies better understand, predict, manage and influence their customers’ behavior.  Portrait’s analytic offerings help companies get past the obvious questions of how many to really delve into the why and the how of customer behavior. 

Built to process large customer data sets, Portrait’s unique analytic offering enables flexible, immediate and actionable profiling, segmentation and modeling of customer data across the enterprise, empowering marketing and analytic personnel to drive the discovery of new customer insight.  Portrait’s modeling solution allows customers to develop a highly accurate model within days, allowing businesses to respond rapidly to dynamic changes in the marketplace.

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 Wells Fargo Bank, Fidelity Investments, Washington Mutual, Merrill Lynch, T-Mobile, Nationwide Building Society, Lloyds TSB, British Telecom and Fiserv CBS.  For more information please visit: www.portraitsoftware.com


Contact details:
Portrait Software      

Hepzi Fonseca
Marketing Director
Tel: 617-457-5200;
Email: hepzi.fonseca@portraitsoftware.com