This collaborative self-service tool is an industry first which empowers users at all levels in the enterprise to share and participate in exploring customer insight.

Self-Service Analytics extends the power of Portrait Software's predictive analytics capabilities by making it easily accessible for use by non-specialist users. Business users can now make faster decisions based on greater customer insight which leads to an increased return on investment through more profitable customer interaction and marketing strategies.

"Until recently, business managers who needed access to customer insight to drive business decisions were caught between two extremes," said Nick Randall, CEO of Portrait Software. "They could use standard Business Intelligence (BI) tools with limited scope for exploring customer data, or turn to sophisticated number-crunching solutions which require specialist skills. Self-Service Analytics removes the layers of complexity and time delays that result from cumbersome solutions and unlocks the value of the data that traditional BI tools cannot provide. Our clients see customer insight as their most valuable business asset and by offering all relevant decision makers the ability to participate in customer analysis, we are helping them gain the agility they need to be more responsive to their customers and to explore new revenue growth opportunities."

Portrait Software's collaborative customer analytics tools are being applied in many organisations today to predict profit-impacting behaviours and propensities that help them reduce customer defection, or churn; increase cross and up-sell opportunities; mitigate against customer credit risk and fraud and measure a customer's lifetime value. In doing so, organisations are seeing a marked increase in customer satisfaction and a much higher return on their campaigns.

Three Levels of Analytics for the Enterprise

Portrait Software’s Self-Service Analytics delivers three levels of interface with customer data, thus enabling key people in the enterprise to collaborate on customer analysis:

The Executive Interface enables decision makers to access data and predictive models through an intuitive, internet-search style interface, with no need for formal training or knowledge of data structures. Through new natural language capability business decision makers can get answers to complex or ad-hoc queries, run over millions of data points within seconds.

The Self-Service Interface allows analysts and business managers to extract rapid value from customer data through a simple web-based interface, providing analysis of customer behavior as well as real-time forecasting of the effect these responses have on business models.

Power Analysts use a "deep dive" interface for the widest exploratory power and deep analytic results. Results are easily shared with the wider enterprise using the Collaborative Framework environment.

The Quadstone predictive modeling environment, unlike other generic analytics tools helps organisations discover how customers are most likely to behave in the future, rather than how they have behaved in the past. With the collaboration framework and the new self service capability the visualisation of data analysis is shared throughout the enterprise bringing customer insight closer to the operational heart of the business.

Gartner Research Director, Gareth Herschel said: "The high cost of asking a different question is one of the key barriers to the take-up of Business Intelligence in the enterprise. Agile businesses need analytic solutions that allow business users to explore their data, drilling into understanding key customer behaviours in a flexible and intuitive way."