Online Customer Service Jobs: The Ultimate Guide for Remote Agents

⏱ Reading Time: 12 minutes

Love helping people through online customer service? Prefer customer support over sales? Do you have excellent communication skills (few soft ones, too) and want to work from home? Online customer service jobs are one possibility if you prefer your space as a workspace. Also, it helps if you want to work in the customer service industry!

 🚀Read Customer Service: A Guide for Successful Business Growth  🚀

2021 has changed the way customers think, act and shop. Nowadays, customers prefer going to the internet for help. Because of that, demand for customer service chat jobs is increasing by the day. In recent years, you have probably seen more brands you use regularly offer customer support through live chat or omnichannel platforms such as Paldesk.

With this in mind, now is your chance to help other companies as a customer support chat agent!

What are Online Customer Service Jobs?

Online customer service jobs include helping customers via the Internet. Helping includes, handling complaints and questions, giving additional information about products and services. Also, taking orders and processing returns. Of course, it very much depends on the field you are working in. Customer service brings a specific value to the customers and satisfies their requests and needs. Precisely because of that, it continually needs boosting and improvements. Happy customer is the best customer and with your help, they can become one!

There are certain differences in online customer service jobs. What they all have in common is that they involve interaction over PC or mobile phone, but they have a different scope of tasks and duties assigned. Some of the most popular jobs are online customer service representatives, online customer support representatives, online call-center representatives, etc.

For example, online call center representatives contact not only current customers, but they also contact potential and former customers. On the other hand, customer support and service only approach current users and users that already bought their product. So if sales aren’t something you see yourself in, this could be a gold spot for you!

Related: 6 Essential Characteristics of a Great Support Agent.

Qualifications for Online Customer Service Jobs

The qualification requirements for online customer service jobs are usually less harsh than other jobs. Still, not everybody can get a customer service job.

In general, you need to meet some of these basic requirements:

• Minimal typos and clear communication with customers
• Multitasking – Handle multiple conversations from different channels at once
• Friendly, professional and positive attitude
• Self-discipline to work from home or other location

Some organizations may require a minimum of 2 years of previous CS experience before you can qualify for these positions. It really depends on the organization you are applying to and the values they accept from their employees.

In addition, maybe you will be required to work full-time and also be available during nights and weekends. Companies know that excellent customer service is most important when it comes to omnichannel customer experience, so they offer 24/7 online support to their customers. On the other hand, there are many part-time positions with flexible hours available too.

Picture 1. Tasks of customer representatives

Online Customer Service Jobs From Home

Today, there are many opportunities to find an online customer service job. We have prepared some of the examples. Additionally, have in mind that some companies may require you to have a college degree. Moreover, you might be required to have previous customer service experience to qualify for certain positions. Also, companies might demand you to live within driving distance of their local office for routine office visits.

1. Virtual Customer Care Professional

Applying for this job, you will need a list of specific skills and minimum requirements:

• Proven success in customer service and consultative sales environment (two years+)
• Passion for building customer loyalty through exceptional listening and consultative relationship building
• Strong written and verbal communication
• Integrity to manage sensitive customer information
• Passion for consultative sales, recommending products or solutions tailored to each customer
• Resilience needed to maintain a steady stream of customer calls efficiently
• Ability to adapt communication style to a wide variety of personalities and situations
• Commitment to implementing feedback as a means of achieving individual and team performance goals
• Technical savvy to multitask and navigate through multiple Windows-based applications
• Timeliness and reliability

2. Front Desk/Customer Service

This is an exciting job if you are looking for something specific in online customer service. Here are the required skills and areas of expertise:

• Multi-line phone or chat systems
• Excellent interpersonal communication skills
• Above average customer service skills
• Setting appointments and maintaining schedules
• Computer literacy in word processing
• Multitasking and strong organizational skills
• Ability to work well under pressure
• Self-motivated and self-directed
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Fluent in Google Drive and other applications

Related: Remote Work Tips and Tricks

Picture 2. Soft skills are a great addition to every customer service employee

3. Customer Service Representative

This is one of the most popular jobs in online customer service. Here is the list of some entry requirements:

• High school diploma or equivalent and three years of office/customer service related experience.
• Knowledge of general billing and collections systems
• Ability to multitask in a fast-paced environment
• Proficient communication, analytic/decision making, and human relation skills
• Knowledge of standard office procedures and tools

Check these customer service representative jobs at Jooble.

4. Technical Support

Some of the key success factors in landing a job like this are:

• Specialized technical and computer skills
• Exceptional communication skills
• Attention to detail and problem-solving skills
• Excellent interpersonal skills
• The ability to prioritize your workload
• The capacity to function well within a team

Where to Find the Best Online Customer Service Jobs?

Nowadays, you can find a lot of companies that are offering online customer service jobs such as online chat agents. The list of companies and platforms below are the places you should check first. Although some of the companies might not be hiring at the moment, you should check back regularly. Good luck!

1. Fiverr

This is a fantastic platform for online customer service jobs. You can offer live chat support there with the basic gig of $5. Also, you can charge more if someone requires more complex tasks. Post your profile on Fiverr and start earning!

2. Capital Typing

This platform hires online customer service support representatives. They also offer transcription services and translation services that you might shine at, too.

3. Arise

This platform employs online chat representatives for various Fortune 500 brands. Those brands are from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. You can start chatting with customers within five days from your application date, and you can set your working schedule.

Related: How to Build a Great Remote Customer Service Team

4. Fancy Hands

One of the great places to try your hand is Fancy Hands, which specializes in 20-minute microtasks. This platform is mostly a one-time gig, you will want to analyze one of the other suggestions for consistent work. But also, you might be able to chat online or email on behalf of your client to solve their problem.

5. Remote.co

Remote.co offers a wide range of remote jobs. Apart from customer service positions, there are design opportunities, developer jobs, HR, sales, even writer and manager jobs. There are numerous great resources for job seekers and a very supportive community.

6. Indeed

Indeed is one of the giant online job boards. When you check their search tab, you can find “online chat jobs” or “online chat support.” Your search results will populate with local and national companies that need remote online chat agents.

7. LiveWorld

If you are interested in social media and messaging customer support, you should have the LiveWorld platform in mind. It’s possible to work part-time and get involved with conversations that are not including sales activities.  You can respond to social media comments or answer questions through online live chat or messaging apps. If you enjoy having a conversation while helping people through social medial, LiveWorld can be a great choice for you.

5 Benefits from Online Customer Service Jobs

1. Possibility to Work from Home

With the improvement of technology, some jobs have been changing a lot recently. Also, the recent world health situation has added another point to the equation. Since customer service jobs are strongly connected with technology, it’s inevitable that they’ve experienced significant changes. Technology is virtually connecting distant places and consequently, people have the opportunity to work from anywhere. Consequently, this contributes to a better work-life balance that remote workers (among them also customer service workers) have. According to global work place analytics, 5.7 million employees of the workforce in America works from home at least half the week and that number in 2021 is only growing.

Picture 3. Benefits of remote work

Virtual customer service jobs can be switched extremely easily to remote work, so it is only logical to expect that a great percentage of them are actually done from home.

2. Market

With the growth of telecommunication providers, there is also an increased demand for workers. It is expected that by the end of 2026 there will be 136,300 customer service representatives. Today, it’s possible to work as a customer service representative almost in every industry. Most of the agents work in a telephone call center, credit and insurance agencies, banks, and retail stores.

BLS projects that by the end of 2026, call centers will employ 36% more representatives than they do now. Therefore, there will be numerous new job opportunities. In general, most customer service representatives are employed in Retail Trade – around 14% of them.

Following those numbers, we have:

• Insurance carriers and related activities (12%),
• Business support services (11%)
• Wholesale trade (7%)
• Professional, scientific, and technical services (6%)

The market for customer service representatives is enormous. Consequently, there are a lot of job prospects if you are interested in this kind of job.

3. New Technologies

The definition of good customer service changes with technology. Like in many other professions, it is extremely important to stay up to date with new solutions. Solving your customers’ problems is the main focus, and there are new ways of reaching this goal emerging every day. This is a great opportunity to learn many new things and expand your knowledge.

Live chat is probably one of the most popular services for virtual customer service at the moment. It is trendy and customers love the way they resolve their problems. Phone calls can become a nuisance and they mostly get their bad reputation from long waits. One of the biggest advantages of live chat is the possibility to handle more than one customer on time. So apart from gaining knowledge about the technical part, introducing live chat can also boost customer service productivity.

Read What is Live Chat?

By providing customer service on websites customer service workers increase the interactivity a brand has with its customers and are a vital part of customer retention process.

Picture 4. Customer service is a important part for Customer retention

4. New Skills

Working in customer service is always the same. Except it isn’t.

Each and every change in your job description is a great opportunity to learn something new. If you work from home, you’ll get to learn a different set of precedures and you’ll have to have to master new software. Maybe you’ll get familiar with new support channels. You’ll have to learn a lot about the brand voice of your company, how to tackle challenging situations when you’re not able to talk to a customer directly on the phone, but rather write.

And all of this is definitely a great addition to your personal and professional development (as well as your CV).

5. Productivity

Due to lots of flexibility, productivity is at a high level in online customer service. It’s possible to work from home, and it includes flexible working hours, predefined goals, and a lot of other factors.

Getting involved in a lot of interactions makes employees busy, so they don’t get bored. And the beauty in it is that it is extremely versatile. There are very few requests that are the same; mostly every new customer/new request brings a new challenge for an agent, thus making work much more interesting.

Picture 5. Stay productive while working from home!

Conclusion

To summarize, online customer service jobs are more and more popular every day. Providing support to customers via the internet brings the greatest value to a brand. Altogether, it results in reaching new customers if the support is truly efficient.

If customer service is something that interests you, be well aware that this kind of job, like any other, comes with a set of specific challenges. But it also comes with benefits which can highly contribute to your work-life balance. Nowadays, in these fast-changing times, it is important to stay adaptive, and a career in customer service is no exception to that.