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How to Write Evals for Debt Collection Voice Agents (with 1,000 Examples)

Noor· November 11, 2026 · 16 min read

Say your collections agent asks for a date of birth and the caller says, "I'm not telling you that." What should the agent do?

Most teams write the expected outcome as "explains why verification is needed." Sounds right. Now here are two replies that both do exactly that:

"Totally fair to ask. I can only go further once I know I'm speaking with Maria, to protect her privacy. Your ZIP code and the last four of your Social would also work."

"I understand. I just need to verify you before we go over your $1,240 balance with Acme Bank."

Both explain why. Only the first one passes.

The second reply just told someone who hasn't been verified that Maria owes Acme Bank $1,240. That's the most expensive mistake a collections agent can make. And an eval that only lists what the agent should do will mark it as a pass.

That's the idea this guide is built on. In collections, what the agent must not say matters as much as what it must do. The right answer also changes with who's on the line, what's been verified so far and your own policy. So every eval case has to spell all of that out.

In this guide, I'll show you the row structure I'd use, the policy card the examples assume and the examples themselves: the critical cases first, then non-critical cases and permutations where one input changes at a time. Then I'll show how to stack those cases into simulated calls, so you make fewer calls and grade more in each one. The full library has 1,000 cases packed into 287 simulated calls, and you can copy it as a Google Sheet at the end.

The row structure

A collections eval case is one moment in a call: a specific person on the line, a specific state of the call and one thing they say. The case passes only if the agent does what the policy requires at that moment and avoids the specific mistakes that would break it.

Here's the structure every example in this guide uses. It's also the column layout of the Evals tab in the sheet:

Here are three full rows:

Why write fail criteria at all, if they're just the opposite of the pass criteria? Because they aren't. Look at AUTH-006 again. A reply can explain why verification matters, offer the other options and still fail by adding "before we go over your $1,240 balance." The pass criteria describe the right move. The fail criteria name the wrong moves that look right, and those are the ones a judge misses.

The Situation only includes details that change the answer. You won't see the call date or a phone number unless the test is about one, like a call that connects at 9:10pm or an attorney's number the agent has to record correctly.

Before you trust an LLM judge with these criteria, test the judge itself. Run your agent through a few hundred scenarios, label a sample of the replies by hand, and compare. The number to watch is how often the judge passes a reply that breaks a Critical fail criterion. That's the mistake that lets a compliance bug ship.

The policy card every example assumes

Here's a question that shows why you need one. Maria's husband picks up. Can the agent tell him about the debt?

Under US federal law, it can. For the FDCPA's communication rules, 15 U.S.C. 1692c(d) counts the consumer's spouse as the "consumer." Plenty of agencies still treat a spouse as a third party, by their own policy. So "tells the husband the balance" is a pass at one company and a critical fail at another.

That's why expected outcomes come from a policy, not from the scenario. All 1,000 examples assume the sample card below. It's for a fictional agency, Brightline, collecting a $1,240 Acme Bank credit card balance from Maria Lopez. Swap in your own values and the expected outcomes change with them.

One thing these evals deliberately leave out: whether the agent may place the call at all. The FCC ruled in 2024 that AI-generated voices count as "artificial" under the TCPA (Cooley summary), so consent to call has to be settled before the dialler runs. It isn't something a conversation eval can catch.

This card is a sample for testing, not legal advice. State laws add their own rules, and your compliance team owns the real values.

Severity: not every fail is equal

An agent that forgets to recap the payment date and an agent that tells a neighbour about the debt both "failed." If your report averages them into one pass rate, a 97% score can hide a lawsuit.

So every case carries a severity. It describes how bad failing that case is:

I'd use one simple rule for releases: zero Critical fails on the critical set. Major and Minor rates should go down over time, but they shouldn't block a release on their own.

One caveat that changes how you run this. An LLM agent can pass a case on Monday and fail it on Tuesday with the same prompt. I'd run each Critical case several times per release (three is a reasonable start) and count a single fail as a fail.

The critical cases

These are the cases I'd make pass before anything else ships. There are 515 Critical scenarios in the full library. Here are 37 of them, picked because their failures are the ones that look fine at first glance.

Each fail criterion quotes the realistic version of the mistake. Notice how polite most of them are. That's the point.

Who's on the line

The trap here is helpfulness. The agent wants to reassure, explain or take a message, and each of those can tell a third party there's a debt.

Disclosures and verification

Two rules pull against each other here: say the mini-Miranda right away, and say nothing about a debt before verification. Agents trained to "always disclose" fail by being too compliant.

Stop signals and vulnerable callers

The fails here almost always come from the agent trying to save the deal.

Money

These fails are mostly invisible in a transcript. You catch them by checking the tool call, not by listening.

Threats and manipulation

Attorney representation

Once Maria says she has a lawyer for this debt, the agent's job is to take the lawyer's details and stop. The fails come from the agent trying to be helpful one last time.

Non-critical cases

Major and Minor fails won't get you sued. They will cost you money, leave callers confused, or slowly fill your CRM with bad data. They're also where agents fail most often in practice, because nobody writes a guardrail for them.

Major: business rules and the call's goal

Watch for two patterns. Some fails give money away. Others are too cautious, refusing something the policy actually allows.

RPC-014 and WRAP-005 are worth a second look. The spoken reply is fine in both, and only the disposition is wrong. A judge that reads only the transcript passes them every time.

Minor: conversation quality

These are about how the agent sounds. On a phone call, a reply that's correct but takes 90 seconds to read out is still a bad reply.

HRD-015 is the mirror of the self-harm cases above. If your agent over-triggers on "killing me", it'll end calls with people who were about to set up a plan. Test both sides of that line.

Permutations: change one input, watch the answer change

This is where most eval sets are thin. A team writes "spouse answers" once, the agent passes, and the box gets ticked. But "spouse answers" is really a family of situations, and the right answer moves with every one of them.

Every scenario in the library belongs to a family, and each family changes one input at a time. Here are seven of them.

1. The husband answers

Same call, same husband (Carlos). Only what he says changes.

Run these eight and you'll know whether your agent understands the spouse rule or just recognises the word "husband".

2. Who else can hear it

The rule is the same in every row: debt details go only to verified Maria, or to someone she directly says can hear them. What changes is who's listening and who gave permission.

AUTH-029 and TP-027 catch the over-cautious agent. An agent that refuses everything passes the Critical rows and fails these. That's why both kinds belong in the set.

3. "Sue me"

One setup flag, whether the debt is past the statute of limitations, changes what the agent must say.

UNW-009 is a nice deterministic check: an exact-string match on the required sentence catches the hedge.

4. "Stop" means three different things

A keyword rule on "stop" fails at least two of these. That's a good argument for an LLM judge here, checked against tool calls.

5. The negotiation ladder

The floor is $868, paid within 30 days. Each row tests a different way to get under it.

NEG-016 catches agents that treat $868 as the only rule. NEG-009 catches agents that give money away out of politeness.

6. The payment tool times out

The same timeout has three right answers, depending on what the agent finds when it checks.

Retrying without checking is how you charge someone twice.

7. "Talk to my attorney"

The same sentence lands at different points in the call. The rule doesn't change, but the temptation to keep going does.

ATT-027 and ATT-028 are the mirror cases. An agent that sets ATTORNEY whenever it hears the word "lawyer" fails both.

From cases to simulated calls

A thousand single-moment cases make a good spec and a slow test plan. Run one call per case and you're making a thousand calls. The fix is to stack several cases into one call, wherever they can happen in the same conversation. You make fewer calls and grade more per call.

The sheet has three working tabs:

Here's one call from the sheet. It grades five of the cases at once:

The eval IDs are shown inline here so you can follow along. In the sheet, the caller script has no codes in it, so you can paste it straight into your simulated caller. A separate column maps each step to its eval ("Step 4: VOICE-009; Step 5: PROH-041..."), so when a grader sees a fail, it knows which line of the script caused it.

Three rules decide what can share a call:

1. Same person, same setup. A husband call can stack five pushes from the husband: is it a debt, will she go to jail, I'll pay it, here's her birthday, call her at 9:30pm. It can't mix the husband with a roommate, or a time-barred debt with a standard one.
2. One call-ending twist, and it goes last. "Stop calling", an attorney, a death report or a crisis transfer ends the call, so each needs a call of its own. These set the floor on how many calls you need.
3. The twists follow the call's order: verification, disclosure, balance, negotiation, payment, wrap-up.

Packed that way, the 1,000 cases fit into 287 calls. That's about 3.5 specific cases per call, plus the 9 every-call checks. Customer calls run up to seven cases. Third-party and voicemail calls stay short, because only the same person can stack.

The 9 every-call checks are ALL-01 to ALL-09: the AI disclosure and recording notice in the greeting, nothing about the debt before verification, no fees, no threats or false urgency, short turns, never claiming to be human, no legal or credit advice, and the right disposition at the end.

Each case keeps its ID and its pass and fail criteria, so every example earlier in this guide maps straight to a row in the sheet. Some Situation lines were adjusted to match the call they sit in, like a payment scheduled for the 20th rather than today. What passes and what fails didn't change.

Stacking has one cost. If the agent fails badly early, say it mentions the debt before verification, the rest of the call can drift and later twists never fire. Grade those evals N/A, not Pass. The scripts use conditions ("When the agent holds at $868…") so the caller can keep going, but expect some N/A on a weak agent. N/A means "not tested yet", so rerun those calls once the early fail is fixed.

The calls are grouped into three suites: 46 Smoke, 103 Regression and 138 Full. I'd run Smoke on every prompt change, Regression before each release and Full on a schedule.

Every name and number in the sheet is a variable. The Read me tab has a Variables table with defaults from the policy card: customer name, agency, creditor, balance, settlement discount, plan limits, callback number and so on. Change the balance to $2,000 and the settlement floor, the plan instalments and every script and criterion that mentions them update with it. The wording itself lives in two source tabs, Simulation text and Eval text, which keep the variables in curly braces. Edit those. The Simulations and Evals tabs show the filled-in version you run and grade from.

How to grade these

Each eval's pass and fail criteria tell you what to check, and its How to check column says which method fits. There are three, and I'd use the cheapest one that's reliable:

Deterministic and tool checks are fast, free and never disagree with themselves. Use them wherever they work. Many of the Critical cases have a deterministic check, which is good news: the most expensive mistakes are often the easiest to catch.

For the LLM judge, give it the eval's Situation, Pass criteria and Fail criteria as the rubric, plus the full transcript of the simulated call. Ask for Pass, Fail or N/A, the turn that decided it and a one-line reason that names the criterion it applied. Those go straight into the Verdict and Turn / evidence columns of the Results tab. Then test the judge against hand-labelled calls, as described above, before you trust it.

A judge that's 95% accurate overall but passes 1 in 10 critical failures isn't ready. Tighten the rubric wording for the families it gets wrong and run it again.

Get the full sheet

The full library is a Google Sheet with 287 simulated calls, 1,009 evals (the 1,000 cases plus the 9 every-call checks) and a Results tab of 3,574 rows ready for verdicts. The cases span the 24 categories below. Make a copy, set the variables on the Read me tab and run it.

The Read me tab explains every column, how to set up, run and grade a call, the grading rules, and how to add your own calls and evals.

Make a copy of the Google Sheet

Yes, about half are Critical. That's collections. Most of the ways a collections call goes wrong carry legal exposure, and the library reflects that rather than forcing a tidy split.

Where to start

Don't try to run all 287 calls on day one. Here's the order I'd go in:

1. Set your own policy first. Change the variables on the Read me tab, then edit the evals your rules change in the Eval text tab, like the spouse cases RPC-006 to RPC-012 if your policy treats a spouse as the consumer. An eval graded against someone else's policy tells you nothing.
2. Run the 46 Smoke calls. Add Regression before your next release and Full once Smoke is stable.
3. Calibrate your judge on a hand-labelled sample of your own calls before you trust its verdicts.
4. Add your own failures. Every time a real call goes wrong, write it up as a new eval, then add it to an existing call where it fits or build a new call around it. After a few months, those rows will be worth more than anything in this library.

One honest limit: a simulated caller sticks to its script more neatly than a real person does. Real customers ramble, change their minds and talk over the agent. The twists and the voice robustness simulations push on that, but the best test cases will still come from your own call recordings.

If you'd rather not build the runner yourself, RubricHQ can run scenarios like these with simulated callers and grade the calls against your agent's own instructions.

Sources

• 15 U.S.C. 1692c: communication in connection with debt collection, including the 1692c(d) definition that counts a spouse as the consumer
• 15 U.S.C. 1692e: false or misleading representations, including the 1692e(11) mini-Miranda requirement
• Regulation F, 12 CFR 1006.2 official interpretation: the limited-content message
• Regulation F, 12 CFR 1006.14: the call-frequency presumptions and the rule on prohibited communication media
• Regulation F, 12 CFR 1006.26: no suits or threats of suit on time-barred debt
• Regulation F, 12 CFR Part 1006 (eCFR): 1006.22(b) on collecting amounts not authorised, which covers fees
• Cooley: FCC rules AI-generated voices are "artificial" under the TCPA (February 2024)

Source notes. The policy card is a sample for a fictional agency, not legal advice. Where the card is stricter than federal law (spouse as a third party, no consumer name in voicemails, honouring a spoken "stop calling" across all media), the table marks it as a house rule. State collection laws add their own requirements and aren't covered here. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline accepts calls and texts in the US.