CONTACT INFORMATION

Nexus Energy Software
www.nexusenergy.com

Bob Whittemore
BWhittemore@nexusenergy.com

WELLESLEY, MA, April 28, 2005 - Nexus Energy Software has deployed its ENERGYprism® customer care applications at NW Natural, a Portland, OR-based gas utility, to enhance its contact center and online customer self-service systems with systems that provide residential customers with insight into energy bill questions. ENERGYprism is available throughout the NW Natural service territory in western Oregon and southwestern Washington.

ENERGYprism applications support utility customer service by providing customers with answers to the most common billing questions, including reasons for the changes in their energy bills, as well as with the information they need to make better energy management decisions.

"Our priority is helping our customers manage their energy usage. The ENERGYprism applications are a significant addition to our customer service, because we now have an easy way to dissect a bill for our customers," said Grant Yoshihara, NW Natural's Director of Utility Services. "Our customer service can become more efficient and effective, and our customers will learn how to use energy more efficiently with the help of these tools. The ENERGYprism products are the best we’ve seen out there," he added.

"We are pleased to be working with NW Natural to extend its residential customer contact center and self-service systems," said Harvey Michaels, Chairman and CEO of Nexus Energy Software; "and we respect their environmentally sound vision for satisfying the customer by promoting the wise use of energy. We are excited to be part of that."

Reducing calls to the contact center is important for NW Natural, but the fact that ENERGYprism allows NW Natural's Call Center Representatives the ability to offer a consistent message is even more so.

"A high bill call is a very complex call to answer," Grant explained. "ENERGYprism gives our CSRs the ability to provide valuable information, and if a customer calls repeatedly, he or she will receive a consistent response."

With ENERGYprism, callers to the contact center and visitors to the utility's web site are able to quickly receive detailed information on their energy bill and usage. In other implementations across the country, ENERGYprism users indicated they now had a compelling reason to view and pay bills on-line. Additionally, bill inquiries among these users were reduced by 90%, and the same percent of users found the revised 'value' bill more understandable than the traditional bill.

In the contact center, Bill Prism provides an optimized interface for CSRs that puts all the information they need to handle bill inquiries at their fingertips, allowing calls to be handled more quickly and CSRs to have greater confidence. The application has resulted in demonstrable increases in first call resolution.

About Nexus Energy Software
Nexus’ proven analytics-based software solutions provide energy companies with greater customer insight and more effective customer interactions across all customer channels, while enhancing key back-office enterprise functions. Nexus’ browser-based product lines work together to transform both energy company and customer views of energy, in order to reduce costs of business services, optimize assets, and reduce natural resources required to meet demand, while becoming more responsive to customer needs.

Nexus’ solutions, in use by more than 75 energy companies worldwide, can be viewed on-line at: www.nexusenergy.com.

About NW Natural
Known to many of its customers as "the Gas Company," NW Natural buys natural gas from suppliers in the western U.S. and Canada and distributes it to 600,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington.

In April of 2005, Business Ethics magazine named NW Natural one of the "100 Best Corporate Citizens" for the fifth straight year in a row.

NW Natural and its predecessors have been providing gas service to the Pacific Northwest since 1859. NW Natural currently serves over 600,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers through 15,000 miles of mains and service lines in western Oregon and southwestern Washington. For more information, please visit www.nwnatural.com.

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