Return on Investment in Three and a Half Months only

Study: Speech Applications pay off fast / Online-Tool for calculating Return on Investment

In only three and a half months, speech applications can recoup its costs. In 2002, it was six months. This is the result of a study performed by the US market research company Opus Research, pointed out by the voice and telephony specialist Clarity.

The speech deployment with the shortest payback period was a call routing and order entry application built from a pre-packaged application. Nearly 80 percent of the respondents reported that their financial results either met or exceeded their Return on Investment objectives. 95 percent of those who haven’t met their expectations still gathered savings from speech. The average payback period of all deployments was eleven months.

The author Dan Miller, Senior Analyst and founder of Opus Research, has presented the study in the Speech Technology Magazine. In 2002, Miller had done a similar study for the Kelsey Group. While the shortest payback period in 2002 was about twice as long, the hard-dollar savings have been reduced since then. In 2002, the average saving per deployment was about $1.5 million. However, in the recent study it was only $375,000 with a range from $100,000 to $1.5 million. Miller attributes this to the wider distribution of speech applications: “Although the dollar value is much lower than that reported in 2002, it is a very positive finding as it reflects speech automation's successful penetration of smaller companies as well as the proven profitability of smaller deployments.

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