Nationwide Building Society Wins Award for CRM


Portrait scoops Information Management Award for driving intelligent and personalised customer interactions

Henley, UK, 12 December 2005 – Portrait Software, a leader in Customer Interaction Management (CIM) software, announced today that its customer Nationwide Building Society has won the prestigious Information Management (IM) Award for the best CRM Project in 2005.. The award was presented for a nine month project carried out at Nationwide Building Society, the largest building society in the UK.

The IM Awards recognise excellence and innovation in the management of business information throughout Europe. Portrait’s entry topped a highly competitive CRM category, which included 29 finalist from blue chip companies in financial services, public and commercial sectors.

The award-winning project, key to Nationwide’s CRM strategy, is helping Nationwide create a consistent and positive customer experience for its 11 million members.  The project which integrates Portrait Software’s Customer Interaction Management solution with campaign management from Unica is enabling Nationwide to deliver personalised sales and service offers to each of its members and deliver on its overall goal of treating customers as people and not as account numbers.

Simon Baines, Nationwide’s head of customer insight, said:“Portrait Software is a key part of our CRM business strategy to help all Nationwide employees put our members first. With nearly 11 million members and tens of thousands of customer interactions a day, this project has increased our ability to meet our members needs more consistently and intelligently whether they choose to interact with us through a Branch or over the telephone. This award is a fantastic achievement for the Society and partners involved.”

As part of this year’s project Portrait was integrated with Unica’s Affinium campaign management system to improve marketing effectiveness through more personalised and targeted marketing.
Customer interaction data is captured real-time in Portrait and together with additional profile information is analysed to build timely and relevant campaigns that are designed to meet individual customer requirements.  Portrait delivers the campaigns through a series of intelligent prompts – which display a prioritised set of sales, marketing and service offers to contact centre or branch employees based on the customers previous behaviour, profile and individual communication rules.  As a result Nationwide can now respond much faster to the changing needs of its customers or market conditions.  Incremental sales to established customers are running well ahead of targets with no negative impact on customer satisfaction.

“Nationwide was the winning entry in the CRM category due to their unwavering commitment to putting the customer at the heart their business.”  said Nick Hewson, CEO and founder of the Hewson Group and one of the panel of judges for the IM Awards.  “Nationwide has achieved with Portrait a level of CRM and marketing sophistication that is often difficult to achieve in large Financial Services organisations. This is largely due to the complexity of consolidating customer data from many disparate systems.  Nationwide has proved that it is possible to build an integrated and highly adaptable CRM and marketing platform that is embraced by its staff and fully supports their vision to put its members needs first.”

Future plans for the award winning system include delivery of increased efficiencies and enhanced functionality that will enable even more complex and targeted campaigns integrated across all channels: email, internet, phone and branches.


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About Portrait Software
Portrait Software™ specialises in Customer Interaction and Analytics software that helps organisations build more responsive, more profitable customer relationships. Its 150 plus customers are organisations that lead the world’s most demanding customer-intensive sectors, including Financial Services, Telecommunications, Public Services, Contact Centres and the Independent Software Vendors that support these markets.  Portrait Software's customers include Fiserv, Nationwide Building Society, KeyCorp, Wells Fargo Bank, Lloyds TSB, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, Mapfre (Spain), BT, T-Mobile, Vodafone and the largest police force in Europe.

For more information please visit: www.portraitsoftware.com

About Nationwide
Nationwide is the largest building society in the United Kingdom, with total assets of more than £117 billion and pretax profits of £500 million?. Its core business is providing personal financial services, primarily handling mortgages, savings and loans. As a mutual organisation, it is owned by and managed for the benefit of its 11 million members (or customers). See www.nationwide.co.uk