Bob Thronsen of Genesys, a company that makes speech platforms for hosting providers, points out, "if you have a lousy speech application it can take a lot of minutes or ports, so why should the enterprise have to pay for that? The completed call approach aligns the service provider with what the enterprise is looking for." TuVox charges either per completed call or by the minute -- the customer can decide. TellMe's pricing model is negotiable -- per call, per minute -- it's up to the client.

All of Angel.com's services are priced by the minute. Mike Sweeney, Angel's director of marketing says, "This pay-as-you-go pricing model means that a customer’s only expense is that which creates business value -- usage." Angel.com's speech systems are very easy to set up. They boast that you may never need to actually talk to them -- choosing, designing, and implementing an automated speech system is all done on the Web.

Voxify and BeVocal both charge by the minute too. A BeVocal representative told me, "This not only mitigates risk for the client, but also provides the appropriate incentive for BeVocal to overachieve. In other words, with a per minute pricing model, BeVocal is motivated to drive up automation rates, thereby increasing the number of minutes that the company handles and consequently the revenue that it earns from its clients."

Convergys' pricing seems unnecessarily complex. They told us: "Convergys doesn't have just one pricing model for hosted speech. Our pricing structure is basically grouped into two areas: the one time Professional Services pricing and Recurring. For Professional Services, the client pays for such things as application development, project management, and tuning the applications, etc. This is more on a per event basis. The Recurring aspect is more on the platform side and we offer a variety of pricing solutions for clients. There is the more straightforward approach of pricing per transaction or per minute. And then there is what we call "value based" pricing. We have different pricing based on whether the entire call interaction can be completed within the automation itself, or if the interaction can be handled up to a point with automation but then must go to a live agent to complete the call, or if the call interaction goes directly to a live agent to complete."

Rex Stringham's (EIG CEO) advice: "Insist on having your vendor commit to service level agreements. That is, the vendor should only get paid if they meet mutually-agreed performance objectives. If the vendor is not willing to "put their money where their mouth is" then they don't really have confidence in their ability to deliver. If they are willing, then you "lock in" the return on investment."