Portrait Software Joins Microsoft; Insurance Value Chain Program

Portrait’s Customer Interaction Optimization software enables insurance companies to leverage customer insight across all customer-facing applications

Las Vegas, May 22, 2006 - Portrait SoftwareTM, a leader in Customer Interaction Optimization software, today announced it has joined the Microsoft Insurance Value Chain (IVC) Program.  Built to support Microsoft’s technology framework, Portrait’s Customer Interaction Optimization suite is uniquely positioned to help insurance companies integrate disparate customer applications across the organization, take the most profitable action and provide the best customer experience.  Portrait’s software offering is currently being used in leading financial and insurance companies around the world.

Microsoft’s Insurance Value Chain (IVC) describes the range of end-to-end insurance processing applications built by more than 70 industry partners developing solutions on Microsoft technologies.  From point of sale to policy administration, these partners share a common goal of providing straight-through processing using Web services, Extensible Markup Language (XML) and ACORD standards.

“Deploying pre-integrated software applications around core business processes has the potential to reduce millions of dollars of integration pain on the part of insurance customers,” said Kevin Kelly, managing director for Microsoft’s U.S. insurance industry.  “We’re excited to have Portrait Software in the IVC program to help accomplish that goal and provide real value to our joint customers.”

Portrait’s Interaction Optimizer product has been designed to alter the quality and profitability of customer interactions by enabling real-time scoring of customers.  This ability to score customers on an ‘on-demand’ basis allows insurance companies with large customer bases to get up-to-the-minute insight on every customer and determine which customer will be more likely to respond to cross-sell, up-sell or other retention actions at any point in time.

“Insurance and financial companies are realizing that customer interactions are particularly challenging - predicting which customers will call and what is the optimal level of service or sell opportunity is very difficult to do without the right level of customer insight,” said Sarah Haskell, Chief Marketing Officer for Portrait Software.  “Interaction Optimizer helps insurance companies leverage every customer interaction and convert these interactions into revenue opportunities.”

Interaction Optimizer converts customer interactions into profitable actions:

Single View of the Customer – By connecting with existing customer and business applications Interaction Optimizer’s process centric architecture allows insurance companies to create a single view of the customer across multiple channels and disparate back-end product silos without duplicating data.

Flexible Business Processes – Portrait’s Foundation toolset enables insurance companies to create flexible, multi-channel customer-facing applications to support critical customer processes including, new business acquisition and service processes – all of which directly affect customer loyalty, retention and profitability.  Portrait’s flexible applications also allow organizations to react to competitive changes and regulatory changes in days, rather than months.

Real Time Predictive Analytics at the Point of Interaction – Portrait’s Interaction Optimizer delivers real-time, best next prompts at the point of interaction across multiple channels – call center, agencies, or internet.  Interaction Optimizer is designed to connect with other existing or new customer relationship management solutions.

About Portrait Software™
Portrait Software™ specializes in Customer Interaction and Customer Analytical 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 processes 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

Contact details:
Portrait Software (US)
Hepzi Fonseca
Marketing Director, North America
Tel: 617-457-5223
Email: hepzi.fonseca@portraitsoftware.com

Portrait Software (UK)
Jo Bateman
Marketing Manager
Tel: +44 (0)1491 416600
Email: jo.bateman@portraitsoftware.com