A recent post on Speech Tech Magazine's website mentions that the biggest cost of rolling out a speech project is the professional services and not the software licenses. The author quotes Gartner’s Steve Cramoysan as saying the average per-port price for speech recognition licenses is $770 in 2004, down 10% from 2003. She calculated (without showing the math) that speech software licenses are no more than 15 percent of the cost of a project for speech.

Stepping back, it's fair to say that a well known fact is: labor is the top cost of any endeavor in almost any situation. People cost money and an investment in technology allows people to be redeployed to higher-value (and more interesting and self-fulfilling) work. What's interesting here is that she makes the claim that "much more work is required before users will be able to purchase packaged applications off the shelf and run them on any platform." I don't think that's really the issue at hand.

Personally, I haven't seen a packaged IVR application that works truly out of the box that a company does not want to customize (okay, potentially voicemail and email). At the end of the day, most companies want to differentiate their IVR or have business rules that make things somewhat (or very) unique to their environment or their customers. It's about business advantage and creating a unique and special relationship with a customer.

The key here is not really the 1 time upfront investment and how do I pay for it that drives the rate of speech adoption (that's financing). It's not about implementing a package (or not) or using professional services (or not). The key is: How do you make customers fall in love with doing business with you? I think it's how you "wow" them and nuture them as a business relationship (e.g., with truly impressive customer service). If you understand your customers and provide great service to them, they'll almost never leave you. To do that, you need to think about customer interactions and then make them great. If those are with IVR applications, then consider how strategic they are, how you maintain them, and how you nurture them over time. Just like you nuture business relationships...