Four ways to get the work done.
Before comparing providers, most teams are really choosing between four models. Here is where each one genuinely wins — including the two cases where you should not hire us.
The four models, honestly.
Judged on the things that actually decide the outcome rather than on headline cost.
| Consideration | Build in-house | Freelancers / marketplace | Shared BPO team | Dedicated offshore teamNovatek |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time to productive | Longest — recruit, onboard, train, all by you | Fast to start, slow to get good | Fastest — team already exists | Weeks, with the ramp planned and visible |
| Product knowledge | Deepest | Shallow; turnover resets it | Shallow by design | Builds like an internal team, because the people are stable |
| Cost per unit of output | Highest in most markets | Lowest headline rate; hidden management cost | Low per contact, higher escalation load | Middle — with supervision and quality included |
| Who manages quality | You | You, entirely | Provider, to a generic standard | Provider, to a scorecard you approved |
| Handles volume spikes | Poorly — hiring lags | Well, if you can find people fast | Very well | Well, with a planned ramp rather than instantly |
| Process documentation | Often skipped | Rarely happens | Provider-owned, generic | Written, versioned and yours to keep |
| Data and access control | Fully yours | Weakest — dispersed and hard to audit | Shared infrastructure | Role-scoped, provisioned by you, auditable |
| Reporting you can trust | Whatever you build | Usually none | A monthly summary | Weekly pack plus access to the underlying data |
| What happens when it goes wrong | You fix it | You replace the person | You raise a ticket | A named delivery lead you can call |
| Best when | The work is core, strategic and small enough to staff | The task is short, self-contained and low-risk | Volume is huge and contacts are simple | The work is ongoing, needs judgement, and must feel like your team |
Novatek delivers the fourth model, and occasionally the third where a client genuinely has simple, high-volume contacts. We do not compete with the first two and will say so on the call.
When not to hire Novatek.
Two cases come up often enough to put in writing. In both, an honest no now saves everyone a bad six months.
The work is your competitive advantage
If the process is the thing that makes you different — the underwriting judgement, the clinical decision, the editorial voice — keep it inside and hire for it. Outsourcing the thing you win on is a false economy, and no amount of documentation fixes it.
What can move is everything around it: the administration, the first-line questions, the data work that consumes your specialists' time.
The work is too small or too undefined
Below roughly three or four people, the supervision, quality and reporting overhead does not pay for itself — for you. And a process nobody can describe cannot be transitioned; it has to be understood first.
If that is where you are, a Discover engagement to document it may be worth more than any team we could sell you.
Compare total cost, not hourly rate.
Most in-house-versus-outsourced business cases understate the in-house side, because the costs are spread across departments and nobody adds them up.
- Salary, plus employer contributions and benefits
- Recruitment fees and the cost of time-to-hire
- Training and the ramp period before productivity
- Management time, at management salaries
- Workspace, equipment, licences and connectivity
- Attrition — re-recruiting and re-training, repeatedly
- Cover for absence, holiday and peaks
- All recruitment and onboarding
- Training, including the assessment before go-live
- Team leadership at the agreed ratio
- Quality sampling, scoring and coaching
- Weekly reporting and a review call
- Workspace, equipment and continuity provision
- Replacement cover at the provider’s cost
Ask any provider what happens if your volume halves.
The answer tells you who is carrying the risk, how flexible the commercial model really is, and whether the relationship survives a bad quarter. It is the most revealing question in the entire evaluation.
Still weighing the options?
Tell us what you are comparing and we will give you a straight read — including the cases where in-house or a different kind of provider would serve you better.