Start Your Remote Working Career
Whether you are already a remote worker or looking for new opportunities, you need to evaluate your career for the changing working conditions worldwide.
New Era in Business: From Field Sales to Virtual Selling
Pandemic changed the perspective of many businesses and industries. 97% of the US businesses are evaluating their go-to-market model. Field sales workforce is reduced by 87% and virtual sales channels will replace field sales moving forward. Before 2020, only 2% of the US workers were working from home. Today, it is 37%. The risk of similar events in the future makes businesses to rethink and move to a tele-workable model. Today, remote working rate is 37% in the US, 45% in Switzerland and only 11% in Cambodia. It is fair to expect that most of the new jobs created in the future will be “remote working”.
Get Ahead in Remote Worker Market
Once the dust settles, the next question businesses will ask is; “How can we make our remote workforce more efficient?”. Some of the jobs can be done by the remote tele-workers who are shared with other businesses. Businesses will only pay as they use the remote shared tele-workers based on the number of minutes they spent over the phone. Freelance worker can support multiple businesses and maximise their earnings. This new model is called “Remote Modular Workforce” .
What is Remote Modular Workforce?
Remote Freelance Talent can be trained for certain skills or modules to handle customer calls from multiple businesses. These skills are the information packs to handle incoming customer calls. Online sales support, retention, renewals, customer service could be some examples. It can also be specific to the business; using available e-learning material, FAQ documents and qualification questions, talent can handle calls from various businesses.
Some of these modules are industry-specific; fintech, retail, hospitality, gaming, charities are the industries which will benefit the most from remote modular workforce.
Career Progression: How to Improve Earnings?
Apart from staying online and handling more calls, you can also make money from “Weekly Retainer Fee”. This is the incentive businesses pay if they have low call volumes but skill need trained people online during their business hours. If you stay “online” 70% of their business hours during the week, you will be paid retainer fee for that week. Each talent should have 3–4 busy skills and 7–8 less busy skills in their portfolio.
As you handle more calls and build up your positive customer feedback, you can also get invited to more business critical skills such as “new business”, “VIP calls”, “retention” and get offered higher per minute rate.
There are also other options for career progression such as becoming a specialist. Getting qualified to serve as on-call medical nurse, becoming an IT Consultant to offer technical help to the callers could be some examples. Per minute rate for those skills are often much higher.
How About Bots and Automation?
In every article about Artificial Intelligence, customer service jobs are mentioned as the first ones to disappear soon. We saw this before; back in 2006–2009, I was supporting many businesses which we trying to outsource their customer service to overseas (India and Philippines). They soon realised that customers do not like the accent and can only tolerate for certain skills. Many outsourced skills were taken back both in the US and the UK. Today, only 20% of the call center agents serving US businesses are in India, 20% in Philippines and 60% is still based in the US. Customer service is about handling the emotional state of the customer. As long as the customers are human beings, they will prefer to talk to another human than a bot.
How to Start?
Yigit Zorlu is the CEO of NoTime Inc. Remote Modular Workforce platform for freelancers and the businesses.