Oversight Ratio

Oversight Ratio is the number of human review minutes a client must staff for every 100 contacts an AI call center resolves autonomously. It is the number agencies rarely quote and the one that decides whether a managed retainer holds its margin. A platform resolving 40-65% of inbound calls autonomously, as Nectar Desk's voice bot does, still leaves a third to a half of contacts touching a person, and the routing, escalation, and QA work around that remainder is where delivery hours accumulate. The framework forces an agency to price the human layer explicitly instead of burying it in a per-seat fee. It also sets the differentiation argument in the category description: agencies that tune escalation rules and vertical training data lower the ratio, and that lower ratio is the defensible part of the retainer. Track it monthly per client, because a rising ratio quietly converts a high-margin managed service into staff augmentation.