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Dedicated seat
Dedicated seat is one named person who works only for your company, on your tools, against your queue. They are not shared across clients. They do not take the next call in a shared skill group. If they are out, the.
Also called named seat, dedicated hire
The word “seat” is borrowed from the BPO floor, where a seat is a billed hour in a production plan. Here it is used against that meaning. A dedicated seat is a person with a name, a start date, and one reporting line. The paper can sit with you (direct hire) or with a Philippine employer of record. The work still belongs to you.
How it works
You write what they own by week four. Inbox to zero by 7:00 a.m. Pacific. Books closed by the fifth business day. Tickets first-responded inside two hours of arrival overnight. That object is the seat. Hiring then tests for that object: writing sample, live working session, background check, locked hours.
Capacity is one full-time equivalent, not a fraction of a pod. If the person is sick on a Tuesday in Quezon City, the queue waits or a teammate you also hired picks it up. There is no invisible bench unless you paid for one. Replacement is a second search with a clock on it, not a supervisor sliding another agent into the same headset.
Example: a founder pays $1,200 a month for “a VA from an agency” and learns in week six that the same person also supports two other accounts between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. Philippine time. Ticket age blows out during those hours. A dedicated seat at $1,800 loaded, with SSS remitted in one employer’s name and a single Slack identity, looks more expensive on the invoice and cheaper in cycle time. The test is whether you can name who owns the queue at 1:00 a.m. Pacific.
How it differs
A BPO seat is utilization against a service-level agreement. The vendor owns the roster. You own the outcome on paper and nobody in particular in practice. Staff leasing and labor-only contracting supply bodies to a principal; DO 174-17 treats the thin version of that as prohibited. A dedicated seat can still be employed by an EOR. The EOR is the legal employer. You still do not share the person with another client. Overnight coverage describes when the seat works. Dedicated describes who they work for.
Common errors
Calling a 20-hour contractor a seat. A seat is a full operating slot, not a gig. Measuring the hire as “tasks completed” while three people rotate through the same login. If the login is shared, you do not have a dedicated seat. You have a queue with a password.