ChatDeskOps / Coverage arithmetic
Section 02One live seat costs about 4.9 people
This page exists because mis-pricing coverage is the single most common way a partner loses money on a 24/7 process. Read it before the commercials.
A seat that must be live every hour of the year needs 8,760 hours of attendance. One full-time person delivers about 2,080. That is 4.21 people before anyone takes a day off.
Shrinkage — annual leave, sickness, training days, coaching, and the gap between one person resigning and their replacement being productive — adds about sixteen per cent. That is where 4.9 comes from, and it is a floor rather than a comfortable estimate.
It is also why the seat band starts at twelve rather than lower. Below twelve you cannot build a roster that covers every hour without giving someone a pattern they will leave within a quarter.
Four coverage bands, and what each one demands
Client customers sit across three continents. The roster is built to the shares below and reviewed monthly against actual arrival patterns — but the shape does not change much, because customers do not change time zones.
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.
| Band | Share of roster | Character of the traffic | Staffing note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia and Asia-Pacific | ~22% | Steady business-hours volume, high how-to share | The most comfortable band to staff from India |
| United Kingdom and Europe | ~30% | Heaviest chat concurrency; morning peak is sharp | Needs the deepest bench for the peak hour |
| US eastern and central | ~32% | Largest single band; broad contact mix | The band where escalation volume concentrates |
| US west and overnight | ~16% | Lower volume, higher severity — production issues surface here | Lowest volume, highest cost per contact to staff |
The quietest band is the most expensive one, and it is the one a struggling provider is most tempted to thin.
What an uncovered hour costs
Coverage is the only measure on this process expressed as one hundred per cent, and the only one with a financial consequence attached directly to it.
| Term | Basis |
|---|---|
| What counts as an uncovered hour | Any clock hour in which the agreed minimum staffing for the band is not met for a continuous period of 15 minutes or more, measured from the platform's own login and presence data. |
| The credit | One seat-day is credited for each uncovered hour. |
| The cap | Coverage credits in a month are capped at 5% of that month's invoice. |
| What is excluded | Client-side platform outage, and force majeure events notified at the time and evidenced. Provider-side power, connectivity, transport and staffing failures are never excluded. |
| How it is evidenced | From the client platform's presence and login data, not from the provider's roster document. The roster is the plan; the platform is the record. |
| Where it is reported | In the monthly coverage report submitted with the invoice, whether or not any credit arose. |
What actually keeps coverage at one hundred per cent
The controllable levers
- A workforce-management analyst who owns the roster as a full-time job, not a spreadsheet a team leader updates on Fridays.
- A bench sized against actual attrition rather than planned attrition.
- Team leadership present on the overnight band — a night shift without a team leader is an uncovered shift waiting to happen.
- Schedule adherence measured daily at 95% or above, because coverage fails through lateness long before it fails through absence.
What breaks it
- Night transport that is unreliable in monsoon or on public holidays.
- A shift pattern that rotates too fast for people to sleep, which produces attrition that looks like bad luck and is not.
- Treating the overnight band as the place to put new agents because it is quiet.
- Carrying a vacancy for three weeks because the seat still bills for the first three days.
Next step
If the arithmetic on this page changes your pricing, that is the point.
Better to find it now than in month two of a twelve-month term.
See the commercial terms Read the provider economics