Callyst vs manual QA: which should you use?

What's the actual difference?

Manual QA means a manager or QA analyst listens to a call and fills in a scorecard. It's the normal way, and teams usually manage a few calls per rep a month: Call Centre Helper says the most common number is 3 to 5 (Call Centre Helper, 12 Apr 2022). SQM Group says manual QA often covers only 1–2% of calls (SQM Group, 21 Sep 2023).

Callyst transcribes every recorded call and scores it on the same scorecard, with a quote from the call as evidence for each score. Serious problems become same-day flags for a manager, and each rep gets a short coaching email every weekday morning.

Topic	Manual QA	Callyst
Calls scored	The few a reviewer has time for	Every call you upload or send
Time per call	A person listens to the whole call	No listening time to produce the score
Judgement on unusual calls	Strong: a person understands context	Weaker: reads only what was said
Same standard every time	Varies between reviewers and over time	Same written questions on every call
Finds the one bad call in 200	Only if it happens to be sampled	Flagged the same day
Evidence for each score	Depends on the reviewer	A quote from the call on every score
Cost	Reviewer time	$40 per rep per month ($300 minimum)

When is manual QA the better choice?

• You have very few calls. If a manager can hear every call already, software adds little.
• Each call is long and unusual. Complex deals where context lives outside the call need a person who knows the account.
• You can't record or share calls. If your rules stop recordings leaving your systems, manual review on your own systems may be the only option. (If you need Callyst in your own cloud, ask us.)
• The point is the conversation, not the score. Listening with a rep is coaching in itself. Keep doing that whatever tool you use.

When is Callyst the better choice?

• There are more calls than managers can hear. Scoring every call means the sample is the whole month, not 4 calls.
• You need to catch problems fast. A promise nobody should have made, or a customer asking to be taken off a list, gets flagged the same day rather than found weeks later, if at all.
• Reviewers disagree. The same written questions are applied to every call. You still need to check the scores match your team's judgement: see how to check AI scores against your managers.
• Reps want feedback sooner. A coaching email every weekday morning beats a review once a month.

How do the costs compare?

For manual QA, the cost is reviewer time: reps × calls reviewed per rep × minutes per review. How long a review takes varies a lot. In one example given to Call Centre Helper by a QA software vendor, a team cut the time to score a call from an average of 36 minutes to 18 minutes by moving from paper to software (Call Centre Helper, 22 Aug 2012). Time yourself on a few calls to get your own number.

• 50calls reviewed a month
• ≈17 hoursreviewer time a month
• $400Callyst for 10 reps a month, every call scored

Callyst is $40 per rep per month, with a $300 a month minimum (1–7 reps). Each rep's plan includes 1,000 calls a month, shared across the team; extra calls are 5¢ each. No setup fee, monthly, cancel anytime. See what call QA software costs for how that compares with other tools.

Can you use both?

That's what we'd recommend. One practitioner rule quoted by Call Centre Helper is to "evaluate only as many customer interactions as you can coach to" (Call Centre Helper, 27 Aug 2020). Scoring every call doesn't change how many coaching sessions a manager can run. It changes which calls they pick: the ones the scores say matter, instead of a random few.