You work where?
At home. When most people learn that I work from home for an actual company I am bombarded with questions. What do you do, who do you work for, how much do you make and can I do it too? Those are the questions I am asked most often.
What do I do? I work for a company that contracts with other companies to provide agents to do customer service, so I am a customer service agent, or representative. Unfortunately the company that I work for does not allow me to disclose their name (to ensure privacy to their clients) so I will refer to them as company “A”. The company who contracts with company “A” I’ll call company “B”. Company A has many companies that use them. Although company B is the work I do, the calls I receive are customers of company A the customer does not know that I am an employee of company A and that I am working from home. For example, if you owned a doctors office and needed a few more nurses, but didn’t want to hire any, you would call a temp agency and they would send over a few nurses from their agency. Although the temps are working in that doctors office, they are paid by the temp agency. But these jobs are permanent.
How does this work? First, Iapplied to company A via their website. The application was pretty much like any other app, but following that I had to take a test to determine if I was qualified. The test consisted of a lot of common sense situations where you would decide what the best way to help a customer would be. If the customer was upset, if they had a complaint, etc. The test also consisted of questions to test your computer skills. Don’t panic, we are not talking programing here. You need to know how to toggle back and forth between screens (windows) and how to maximize and minimize your screens, basic stuff like that. If you are unsure of how to do that, check out this tutorial.
Make sure that you know what to do and are ready before you take the test because if you fail, you must wait 6 months before you apply again.
Now, the most important (!) thing, how much money do I make? Well, not a lot. That is why I said supplement to your income. This can be a full time position, but I only work part time as I have other responsibilities, this blog being one of them. I am paid per hour, and with this particular company (B) I receive small bonuses periodically if the call volume is really high and they don’t have enough agents and are trying to bribe you into working 
. My per hour rate is $8 to $9 per hour. Some companies pay more per hour, or pay per call. When you factor in no gas money, lunch money, work clothes ( I work in my PJ’s most days) and that I have no child care expenses, it adds up to a lot more because everything I make minus taxes goes into circulation.
So how do you know which company I work for? Well you are just gonna hafta guess! Or you can ask me, I just can’t post it on the internet. It is on the list of ligitimate work from home jobs.