Anyone have any experience with this? I start 11/28 taking calls.

Is this a mystery shop or did you become and employee of a company taking their customer service calls from home instead of going into an office?

Don't they normally provide for your Internet, phone and computer needs for such jobs?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/15/2022 06:20PM by wrosie.

this company does not offer stipends for expenses. its a hourly paid customer service job answering phones for the holidays for a huge number of national chains



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/15/2022 06:46PM by cooldude581.

There are some recent YouTube posts from actual reps

@Angelbug wrote:

There are some recent YouTube posts from actual reps

I'm not even sure who the employer is. Are the videos good or bad?

I can't see answering customer service calls for multiple companies. Most companies have a couple of weeks or more of training before you answer live calls for just their company.

Also, how would you know what company they are calling about so you could answer it correctly? What I mean is "Hello, this is ABC company, this is Joe, how can I help you?"

LIveops is the company. They contract with multiple companies but train you on one to start and then after 6 months you have a chance to add another company.

@cooldude581 wrote:

LIveops is the company. They contract with multiple companies but train you on one to start and then after 6 months you have a chance to add another company.

I'm familiar with live person. I wonder if LiveOps is similar. There are some legitimate work from home customer service jobs and a lot of people like them. I hope it works out! It's a good opportunity to add some income.

cooldude,
Please post on your experience with this gig. It may be something that I would want to try if it works well for you.

First, you are an independent contractor for LiveOps. They 1099 you.

The two YouTube videos I watched state you get paid between $.31 and $.37 per minute you are talking to a customer.

Neither YouTuber stayed with it long. One lasted 2 months but stayed on their text messages where he could jump back in and pick up calls when they were busy.

You also have to buy your own headset ($89 for one that a youtuber bought) and are not paid while you take their training which took one youtuber a week to complete.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/16/2022 11:17PM by wrosie.

@cooldude581 best of luck to you with Liveops. It is disappointing to hear that they don't pay for your equipment, training, or supporting platform -- internet/phone line. I saw a review where you can experience 30 minute blocks of time where there are no calls and that means no money. You are tied to your desk waiting and you can't do anything else.

I wonder if you can still rack up minutes by telling the customer "I will place you on a brief hold while I check into that" and you can take a restroom break when you already knew the answer. Obviously you can eat at your workstation and just mute the phone while you are chewing and the customer is talking.

I suppose the tradeoff with liveops is you don't have to worry about a commute, related expenses like gas, dressing up for work since you can do it in your shorts (saw a vid where there are some opps where you have to be on live camera with a uniform shirt), and that transit time could be used for fielding calls and making money. I just thought the pay would be higher since you are investing your own money in the headset and paying for the line -- although you already have internet.

I called ATT the other day to lower my bill and I was dismayed in the people handling the calls. English was not their first language which is not the bad part, but any objective observer would note they were not the easiest to understand. Effective communication has to rank up their for this job. The phone connection was bad and I thought: this is the company that handles my phone lines?!

Someone mentioned that a good percentage of the call center reps that get hired, go through the paid training, and then flake before starting a minute on the phones or quit after two days.

Significant investment of time beyond the training. No live support while on the call. I dropped it.

Many thanks for the update.

Did you get to the point of taking customer calls? Hopefully you can return the headset. How long was the training? Thanks for following up here with the update.

There was no mention of a specific headset in any of the paperwork. Dual monitors was suggested. I told them i only had one monitor and they got me signed up. Background check, cable internet speed check and using a lan connection were required. My specific training was either 9-11a or 5-7p. 3 weeks. You dont have to commit to either time slot. You have to attend 1 session a day. You can attend both if you want. 2 weeks training and then 1 week of listening. All unpaid. They only pay if you yourself are taking the calls. So none of the training is paid.

We were asked to form study groups and learn the website for the client on our own. Their excessive use of "boss" and "your business" smelled to much like Cutco.

Also Telus is asking me to commit more than my 10 hrs weekly and I can do that while substitute teaching as its just task work. No unpaid training and exceedingly simple instructions.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2022 04:01PM by cooldude581.

@cooldude581 wrote:

We were asked to form study groups and learn the website for the client on our own. Their excessive use of "boss" and "your business" smelled to much like Cutco.

For you to have to learn the website on your own time and unpaid is a slap in the face. They are just getting you to work for free. You don't get paid more if you learn the website. If no customers call in during your 30 minute assigned block, then you get paid nothing. That is wrong too. Call center workers get paid whether customers phone in or not.

If you are going to be your own boss, then you would deal directly with the company customers are calling in to and not Live Ops

This sounds so much like one of those companies paying people through 1099s, that should be paying wages instead--complete with their share of Social Security and Medicare taxes.

I did work for a similar company (it was over 10 years ago) and you got paid per minute. Some days you would be on the phone all day and could stay on after your "shift" but some days it would be harder to really hit 8 hours of talk time. Regardless, good luck!

@joanna81 wrote:

This company apparently pays by the minute you are on the phone with a customer, nothing for your wait time.

It was usually obvious to me that customer service phone reps knew no more than I did after doing my research. They just repeat some paragraph I've already read on their website and cannot address issues beyond that.

This topic confirms my suspicion.

the headset was $15 and im actually getting some use out of it no big investment