Building a remote contact centre in India: tech stack and monthly cost

You can stand up a 25-seat remote contact centre in India in 4-6 weeks. The hard part is not picking software — it is the half-dozen non-software decisions (carrier contract, headset model, internet redundancy, DLT registration) that quietly determine whether your team hits the ground running or stumbles for three months.

This post is the line-item budget and tech stack we have seen work in production. Numbers are for 2026 INR.

The shape of the team

Let us anchor on a representative team: 25 agents, 3 team leads, 1 QA analyst, 1 ops manager. Use cases mixed between SDR outbound and inbound support. Distributed across India (mostly Tier 2 cities — Lucknow, Indore, Coimbatore, Vizag, Jaipur).

Adjust the numbers for your headcount, but the percentages between line items hold roughly constant.

The full stack

Telephony / dialer

This is the spine. You need:

• Cloud dialer or self-hosted dialer engine
• DID numbers (one per simultaneous outbound channel, plus a couple for inbound)
• Carrier minutes (per-minute rates)
• Recording storage

Workforce

• CRM
• Ticketing
• WFM (workforce management — schedule, leave, shift)
• Quality monitoring

Identity + collaboration

• SSO (Google Workspace or Microsoft 365)
• Chat (Slack or Teams)
• Internal docs (Notion, Confluence)
• VPN / device security (Tailscale or similar)

Agent endpoint

• Laptop / desktop
• Headset (this matters more than people think)
• Backup internet
• UPS / inverter for power outages

People

• Salaries (the biggest single line item — usually 60-70% of total cost)
• Training + onboarding
• Statutory (PF, ESI, gratuity)

Monthly cost — 25-agent breakdown

Telephony (~₹50,000 - 90,000/month)

• Dialer platform: ₹1,200/agent × 25 = ₹30,000 (dialque, per-active-user)
• DIDs: 30 numbers × ₹600 = ₹18,000
• Outbound minutes: assume 4 hours talk time/agent/day × 25 agents × 22 days = ~55,000 mins. At ₹0.40-0.60/min (direct Vilpower trunk) = ₹22,000 - 33,000
• Recording storage: 50GB/month at S3 prices = ~₹500

If you go with a bundled-minute cloud telephony provider (any platform that marks up per-minute rates on top of the carrier cost), this line moves to ₹80,000 - 1.3 lakh.

Workforce software (~₹35,000 - 55,000/month)

• CRM: ₹500-2,000 per user × 25-30 users (Zoho ₹800/user, HubSpot ₹3,000/user)
• Ticketing: ₹1,000 - 2,500 per agent (Freshdesk, Zoho Desk)
• WFM: Keka / Asanify / Darwinbox — ₹150-250/employee/month
• QA tool: ₹500-1,000 per QA seat × 1-2 seats

Identity + collab (~₹15,000 - 25,000/month)

• Google Workspace Business Standard: ₹782/user × 30 = ₹23,460
• Slack Pro: ₹600/user × 30 = ₹18,000 (or Teams if Microsoft instead of Google)
• Notion Team: ₹650/user × 30 = ₹19,500

You will not need all three of Workspace + Slack + Notion — most teams pick two.

Hardware (~₹2-3 lakh one-time, amortised ₹15,000-20,000/month over 18-24 months)

• Laptops: ₹40-60k each, 28 units → ₹12-17 lakh CapEx
• Headsets: ₹3,000 - ₹8,000 each (Plantronics Blackwire, Jabra Evolve). Spend on this. Cheap headsets cause CSAT issues and agent fatigue.
• 4G dongle as backup internet: ₹500-1,500/month/agent for agents in unreliable areas
• UPS: ₹3-5k per agent in areas with frequent outages

Internet + power per agent (~₹15,000-22,000/month for the team)

• Primary fibre: most agents already pay ₹500-1,000 themselves. Reimburse if you want
• Backup mobile data: ₹500/agent if you provide
• Subsidy or stipend: ₹1,000-2,000/month is standard for WFH teams

Salaries (~₹3.5-5 lakh/month for the team)

• Junior agent (0-1 yr exp): ₹15,000 - ₹22,000/month CTC in Tier 2 cities
• Senior agent (2+ yr exp): ₹25,000 - ₹35,000/month
• Team lead: ₹40,000 - ₹60,000/month
• QA analyst: ₹30,000 - ₹45,000/month
• Ops manager: ₹70,000 - 1.2 lakh/month

For 25 mixed-tenure agents averaging ₹22,000 + 3 TLs at ₹50k + 1 QA at ₹38k + 1 ops at ₹85k = ₹6.83 lakh/month salary, base. Add 25% for PF/ESI/gratuity = ₹8.5 lakh/month fully loaded.

That last number is usually the surprise — software and hardware combined are ~₹1.5 lakh, but salaries are 5-6x that.

Total monthly run rate (25 agents)

• Telephony: ₹70,000
• Workforce software: ₹45,000
• Identity + collab: ₹20,000
• Hardware (amortised): ₹18,000
• Internet + stipend: ₹20,000
• Salaries (loaded): ₹8.5 lakh
• Total: ~₹10.5 lakh / month

Software + hardware ≈ ₹1.7 lakh = 16% of total. Salaries are 80%. Telephony specifically is ~7%. The dialer/cloud telephony choice is meaningful but it is not what makes or breaks the unit economics — the agent productivity it enables is.

Decisions that quietly matter

Direct carrier vs bundled BSP for minutes

Going direct (Vilpower, Tata, Airtel Business) saves 30-50% on per-minute rates but requires a SIP trunk integration and 4-6 weeks of paperwork. Worth it past ~50,000 outbound minutes/month.

One headset model for everyone

Standardising on one headset model means one driver to support, one charging cable, predictable mute-button behaviour. Saves ~5% of agent-IT-support tickets. Recommended: Plantronics Blackwire 3220 (USB, ₹4-5k) or Jabra Evolve2 30 (₹6-8k).

Internet redundancy

WFH agents on a single ISP will drop calls 1-3 times per shift in monsoon-prone areas. Issue every agent a 4G dongle (Jio / Airtel) as a hot-failover and call it ₹500/month per agent. CSAT score will move 5-10 points.

Power backup

Same logic. In Bihar / UP / parts of Maharashtra, daily outages are real. A ₹4k UPS keeps the agent's laptop + router up for an hour, which is usually enough to bridge an outage. ROI in saved abandoned calls is < 3 months.

Self-hosted vs cloud

At 25 agents, both work. At 50+ agents, self-hosted dialer pays back in carrier savings within 6-9 months. At 100+ agents, it is the obvious choice. dialque supports both modes from the same codebase — start cloud-managed, move to self-hosted on AWS or your own DC later.

Recording storage tier

Hot storage (immediately accessible) is ~10x more expensive than archive storage. Keep recordings hot for 30 days, archive after. DPDP Act and most operational use cases need 3 years retention — that retention almost always lives in archive.

What you do not need (yet)

A common mistake: buying enterprise-tier tools for a 25-agent team because the vendor's salesperson said you would "grow into them". Things to skip until you actually hit the headcount:

• Real-time speech analytics (only valuable past 50 agents with consistent script discipline)
• Advanced WFM with forecasting (Excel works fine until 60+ agents)
• Multi-tenant dialer (you do not have multiple tenants yet)
• Dedicated VOIP MPLS link (cloud routes are fine at this scale)
• ITIL-tier ticketing (Freshdesk basic plan handles everything you need)

Set-up timeline

Realistic 6-week plan for a 25-agent WFH centre:

| Week | Milestone | |---|---| | 1 | Entity registration sorted, DLT initiated, CRM trial, dialer selected | | 2 | DIDs ordered, headsets / laptops procured, first 5 agents hired | | 3 | DLT approved, headers + templates approved, agent training starts, soft launch with 5 agents | | 4 | Carrier integration tested, recording compliance check, CSAT measurement set up | | 5 | Headcount up to 15, manager hired, QA process started | | 6 | Full 25-agent launch, monitoring + on-call rotation in place |

Compress this if you outsource hiring, expand it if you go through long procurement cycles.

Frequently asked questions

Is WFH cheaper than office-based for India contact centres?

At 25 agents, marginally — you save real-estate (~₹1-1.5 lakh/month for a 25-seat office in Tier 2 cities) but you pay for stipends + redundancy hardware. The bigger win is hiring radius — WFH lets you hire from Tier 3 cities at 60-70% of metro salaries.

Should I buy laptops or have agents use their own?

Buy. BYOD creates support nightmares (driver issues, software versioning, security risk), and DPDP Act + customer data regulations are easier to defend when devices are company-owned.

What is the smallest team this stack makes sense for?

~8 agents. Below that, you can run on click-to-dial + Google Workspace + Excel and not need a dialer-grade telephony stack.

Where do most teams overspend?

CRM. Salesforce / HubSpot Enterprise tiers are routinely bought by 15-30 agent teams that would do fine on Zoho or Pipedrive at 1/4 the cost.

A 25-seat remote contact centre is closer to a software-light, ops-heavy operation than a tech project. Get the carrier contract and headset standardisation right, instrument abandon rate + CSAT + connect rate from day 1, and the rest is iteration.