Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Daniel Ives - Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co.
Daniel Ives - Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co.
Let’s say this three months and the last three months you did a great job on cost control. Can you just give us an anecdotal discussion as to the selling environment, customers, maybe even month-by-month throughout the quarter? Did it get worse or better? Something to that extent would be helpful.
Jim Milton
As I mentioned in our prepared remarks obviously we had, I think I said a great but probably the more appropriate term would have been ?blow out? quarter in the fourth quarter on solutions bookings. If you recall we delivered in the $39 million of solutions bookings range so I think some of our weaker performance in Q1 was certainly based upon the great performance we had in Q4. So that caused us to have a relatively slow start to the quarter as I mentioned.
Additionally, not any surprise to anybody on this line I’m sure, is the financial services sector was weak but as I also said in my prepared remarks the good news is we are not seeing those projects go away. We are seeing them getting broken up into smaller pieces or phases as those various financial services institutions decide to, if you will, defer some of their capital spending but get started on driving thankfully in our systems we deliver pretty good ROI so financial services segment is obviously weak but not completely gone to sleep because we are still seeing business from that sector.
In general throughout the quarter I would say it got stronger as the quarter went on. Some of that again based upon our great finish to last quarter and I was optimistic enough as we headed into this quarter and where we are in this quarter at present to state that I expect our backlog will grow coming out of the second quarter. By and large I would say I am fairly optimistic about the environment in general. Some of that is due to the nature of what we sell.
Thankfully, especially on the IVR Voice Portal side, we can drive tremendous cost savings to companies and we have seen implementations of our technology result in ROI’s of six months. Certainly less than a year in some cases. If you just do the math the average call handled by an IVR or self service system is $1.00 or less. The average call by a live agent is typically $7-12 per call. You can see if you can deflect calls from going to live agents the return is astronomical.
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