In-house or outsourced: the QA maths most floors never run

Every collections floor has made this decision. Very few have modelled it.

The question — keep call audits in-house or send them out — usually gets settled on instinct, on headcount politics, or on whichever option the last vendor conversation made feel safer. When numbers do appear, they appear in one unit: rupees per agent per month.

That unit is the problem. It prices the size of your floor. It says nothing about how much listening actually happens on it.

Switch to a different unit — cost per audited call — and the comparison often changes shape. Not always, and not always in the same direction. But often enough that a decision taken on the first number deserves re-running on the second.

So this week is the calculation itself, with no conclusion attached. The inputs vary too much between floors for anyone to hand you an answer. What can be handed over is the structure, and the cost lines that quietly go missing on each side when this gets done on the back of an envelope.

What the internal number leaves out

Two things, and both are structural rather than careless.

The first is that a reviewer’s salary is the smallest part of a reviewer’s cost. Around it sit supervision time, calibration sessions to keep scoring consistent between reviewers, re-training after attrition, leave cover, storage and retrieval of recordings, and the ops-head hours spent arbitrating disputed scores. None of these appear in a headcount budget. All of them are real, and most are invisible precisely because they are somebody else’s line item.

The second is a capacity ceiling that no budget can lift. A reviewer gets through a finite number of calls in a day, set by call length, form complexity, and how much of each call has to be heard rather than skimmed. Multiply that by productive hours and working days and you have a hard monthly ceiling per reviewer.

Which means your coverage percentage is not a policy choice. It is that ceiling divided by your call volume. An internal programme cannot buy coverage without buying headcount, in a straight line, indefinitely.

Run it with your own numbers

Take the arithmetic in this order, and put your own figure in every slot:

1. Calls generated per month — connected calls, not attempts.
2. Calls one reviewer completes per hour — measured honestly, on your own forms, not the number anyone claims.
3. × productive hours per day × working days = one reviewer’s monthly ceiling.
4. Reviewers needed for the coverage rate you believe you have.
5. Fully-loaded cost per reviewer — salary plus every line in the paragraph above.
6. Divide by audited calls. That is your cost per audited call.

Run the same final division on any external quote. The two numbers are now comparable. They were not before.

Most floors are surprised twice: once by their real coverage rate, and once by what each audited call is actually costing them.

What the outsourced number leaves out

Worth being precise here, because this is the side that usually gets oversold.

The RBI’s Managing Risks in Outsourcing Directions, 2025 — issued in parallel for non-banking financial companies, commercial banks and all-India financial institutions — restate a principle that has sat in Indian outsourcing regulation for years. Outsourcing does not dilute regulatory responsibility. The board and senior management of the regulated entity remain accountable for the outsourced activity, whatever the provider’s size, location or sophistication. Outsourcing agreements are also expected to permit audit of the provider, and its subcontractors, by internal and external auditors and by the regulator.

The practitioner reading is straightforward. Sending audits out changes who does the listening. It does not change who answers for what was said on the call. And it creates an obligation of its own — you now have to oversee the provider, with contractual rights to inspect them, and someone has to do that work.

So vendor oversight belongs on the outsourced side of your model. A comparison that omits it flatters the external quote exactly as omitting calibration and attrition flatters the internal one.

For the avoidance of doubt: The Heartbeat sells outsourced call audit. That is a reason to test this arithmetic against a competing quote, not to take our framing on trust.

The takeaway

Four things to establish before your next QA budget conversation:

1. Your real coverage rate — audited calls ÷ connected calls, last full month. The actual figure, not the target.
2. Your cost per audited call, in-house, fully loaded, including the lines that never reach the headcount budget.
3. The same figure for any external quote, with your own oversight time added on top.
4. What your lender clients are now asking. In vendor reviews the question is shifting from whether you run QA to what proportion of calls it covers.

If the first two numbers take more than a fortnight to produce, that is itself the finding.