TuVox Offers New Deal for Speech Application Ownership
TuVox yesterday launched its Accelerated ROI Program, a plan the company says will help enterprises during the current economic downturn by allowing them to realize a faster ROI when investing in TuVox speech technology.
According to TuVox, the program reduces up-front costs common to speech technology implementations and upgrades. And this, the company says, allows enterprises to quickly see the financial benefits of a speech investment.
According to Nick Ezzo, director of marketing at TuVox, the company observed that many of its customers and potential customers were facing budget and capital expenditures freezes because of the economic downturn.
“We put our heads together here at TuVox and said ‘How can we make this work so that [companies] don’t have to outlay a huge chunk of cash up front and they can still get the benefits of speech applications?’” he says.
The program—which TuVox touts as a “first-of-its-kind ownership program”—enables companies to utilize operating expenses instead of leveraging capital budgets when investing in speech.
Ezzo explains the Accelerated ROI Program like this:
If Company X freezes its capital budget and has less money to work with, TuVox will reduce the upfront implementation fee for the configuration of TuVox On Demand. Once the solution is deployed, those upfront savings are rolled into Company X’s monthly payment for ongoing managed services and dispersed over the life of the application.
The savings, he says, come about because of the cost savings inherent to speech applications: “Because speech-enabled [interactive voice response (IVR) systems] or next-generation IVR has a built in cost savings—people implement it to save money—then they’re really paying for the system out of the savings that their enjoying.”
The TuVox Accelerated ROI Program is now available for qualified customers willing to upgrade their IVR system to TuVox On Demand.
According to Ezzo, about five to seven companies that TuVox works with had been prepared to put projects on hold, but are now reconsidering because of the Accelerated ROI Program.
“It’s really breathed new life into the sales cycle,” he says. “Overwhelmingly, the response has been positive. In fact a lot of people say this is really timely.”
As to the distant future, the program’s fate—when recession finally ends—remains uncertain.
“Everything’s on the table if it makes sense for our customers,” Ezzo says. “We wouldn’t necessarily take it away if it made sense and people were actually receiving benefit from it.”