Always on · AKO-SAS-CHD-2026-04
Twenty-four hours is not three shifts. It is 4.9 people per seat.
Akontec is placing a round-the-clock live chat and email support process with selected BPO service providers in India, serving software companies in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Non-voice, dedicated seats, billed flat per seat per month. The hardest part of this process is not the conversation — it is the roster.
- Base rate
- $1,000per productive seat, per calendar month, flat
- Seat band
- 12–60twelve is the floor for a viable 24/7 roster
- Channels
- Chat + emailroughly 65% chat, 35% email, no voice
- To go-live
- 15 dayssignature to the first live conversation
The roster is the product
Partners quote this process off a headcount number and discover the coverage cost in month two. Here is the arithmetic, before anything else on this site.
A twelve-seat engagement is therefore roughly sixty people, not twelve. That is the single most common reason a partner mis-prices this process. Twelve seats is the floor precisely because below it you cannot build a roster that covers every hour without someone working a pattern no one will stay in.
Twenty-four hours of client time, and the share of the roster each band absorbs. Every one of them has to be staffed on a Sunday at four in the morning to the same standard as a Tuesday at eleven — because a customer with a production issue at three a.m. does not accept that the desk is thin overnight.
Non-voice, written, and permanently in demand
Written, not spoken
Accent is not a factor. Written English, product comprehension and the discipline to hold three conversations at once are — a different and, for many providers, a deeper talent pool than voice.
Software companies cannot switch it off
A subscription business that goes quiet overnight loses renewals. Support is not a cost line the client can pause when the quarter is tight; it is the thing the renewal rests on.
Concurrency is the skill
Three simultaneous chats, each with its own thread and its own context, is a distinct capability. It takes six weeks to build and it is the reason the ramp cannot be compressed.
How it differs from a general customer-service campaign
| A general support campaign | This process | |
|---|---|---|
| Channel | Voice-led, chat as an overflow | Chat and email only, no voice at all |
| Unit of work | One conversation at a time | Two to three concurrent chats plus an email queue |
| Agent profile | Service-minded, trained in days | Product-literate, writes well, trained over six weeks |
| Coverage obligation | Business hours, sometimes extended | Every hour of every day, including public holidays |
| Where knowledge lives | In the agent's head and a script | In a knowledge base the agent must cite |
| What breaks the account | Missed service levels | An uncovered hour, or answers the customer cannot rely on |
Akontec brings, and you bring
Akontec brings
- The client relationships and the commercial risk behind them. You invoice Akontec against the seat register, not the client.
- The knowledge base, the escalation matrix and the macro library — maintained centrally, not left to your floor to invent.
- The coverage plan and the roster template each band must satisfy.
- Governance: named owners, published escalation ladder, monthly calibration.
You bring
- A floor that genuinely runs at night — transport, security, catering and supervision at three in the morning, not a day floor with a skeleton crew.
- Agents who write well and can hold three threads at once.
- A workforce-management analyst. This is the role partners skip and the one that decides whether coverage holds.
- Team leadership on every shift, including the overnight band. A night shift without a team leader is an uncovered shift.
Every other measure on this process is a percentage. Coverage is the only one expressed as one hundred per cent, and it is the only one with a credit attached.
What the process is worth to a provider
An illustration at thirty seats on Chennai and tier-two metro salary bands as at Q3 2026, at an indicative INR 95 to the dollar. Nothing here is a forecast or a commitment.
| Measure | At 12 seats | At 30 seats | At 60 seats |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contribution margin | 31.5% | 39.6% | 41.4% |
| Monthly contribution (INR) | 3,59,300 | 11,27,500 | 23,58,880 |
| Per seat, per month (INR) | 29,942 | 37,583 | 39,315 |
Everything a delivery partner needs before contracting
Next step
Before you price this, read the coverage page.
It is one page of arithmetic, and it is the difference between a thirty-nine per cent margin and a loss-making roster.
Apply to deliver this process Read the coverage arithmetic