When I was doing my job lead round-up a few days ago, I came across an interesting home-based job lead for a company called Support Space. If you’re the person everyone you know calls when they need help with their computer, you might be intrigued by this job opportunity.
Currently only people living in the United States are eligible to become virtual experts for SupportSpace.
About the Company
SupportSpace is a company that provides remote technical services to customers. They boast being the first company to do this via “the cloud” through their virtual expert network, of which you can become a part of if you can pass their assessments and successfully make it through the certification process.
The Job
As part of the virtual expert network, you will work at home taking calls and/or chats from people who are needing tech support. According to the job listing, this is done for people who have enrolled in a pre-paid tech support plan through a well-known nationwide retail chain. Once you are in the network, you can set up your profile and list what your expertise is in, and customer inquiries will be routed to you based on that.
I contacted SupportSpace to find out if their workers have to be available for both phone calls and chats or if they could just choose chats because I know so many of you are seeking non-phone jobs. Here is the reply I received:
“The Experts on our network will typically need to support both phone and chat sessions to get a good amount of sessions. We work with Partner companies who supply the majority of the customers the Experts receive – and for the most part those Partner’s supply phone sessions. There are some Partners, however, that are chat-only so the option is available if Experts just want to support chat.”
Customers you help are allowed to rate you and apparently the higher you are rated, the more calls will be routed to you in the future. You do not get paid for customers you were not able to help.
Pay
According to the job listing, “Compensation is typically a fee paid for a successfully completed service, and the amount is based on the type of service you provide. Some SupportSpace Experts earn over $6,000 USD a month by providing a high level of service. Experts are paid monthly for services provided the previous month.”
SupportSpace sends out payments on the 15th of each month for work done the previous month as stated above, and payment options are either a paper check mailed to you or Paypal.
Employment Status
SupportSpace takes you on as an independent contractor, so this is not an employee-based position.
Flexibility
This appears to be an incredibly flexible opportunity. SupportSpace operates 24/7 so you can work whenever you want to and also as much or little as you want. There is no maximum or minimum amount required to work and no schedule to sign up for.
Technical Requirements
No cell phones or GoogleVoice
Landline or Skype recommended
Call waiting and voicemail must be disabled.
Computer Requirements:
A dedicated computer for customer sessions
2 GB of RAM (4GB of RAM recommended)
Minimum 1 GHZ required
I.E. 8 or 9, Firefox, Chrome
Stable high-speed Internet access (minimum 512 kbps)
No tablet
Mac OSX not supported (unless working from a virtual machine)
Current anti-virus software installed
The Application Process
If you are interested in becoming part of the virtual expert network, you’ll have to score at least 70 percent on an assessment test. If you pass this, you can proceed to the certification process. According to the FAQ, this process can take anywhere from one to three weeks. It is also necessary to submit to a criminal background check. If everything comes back OK on your background check and you pass the assessments/certification, you can begin working.
So as you can see, it doesn’t appear that any college degree or formal training is required. Everyone has a chance to get in here provided they can pass the tests.
Feedback
The SupportSpace virtual expert opportunity is not one that gets mentioned much on the various work at home forums I visit. However, I was able to dig up some interesting reviews at GlassDoor and also on Complaints Board. It looks to me as though the feedback is mixed — some have had good experiences while others have not (which is the case with most things).
I would suggest reading through these to get a better idea of how things work and what others have had to say about the opportunity.
Getting Started
If you’d like to go ahead and start the application process, you can go here to take the initial assessment. You may also want to give their FAQ a read through.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the tip on SupportSpace.com. I am a computer tech with 8 years of experience repairing PC’s on a helpdesk. I went ahead and took the Support Space test only to have the test time out on me 2 questions before I came to the end. I assumed, very wrongly, that if I did time out it would accept everything, including blanks. Instead, it looks like it just rejected my entire test, which I can only take once. I didn’t think that I was running so close or I would just have marked everything and submitted.
When testing for them, be sure to use a stopwatch, egg timer, or something so that time won’t get away from you, and do submit at least 15 seconds before you have to, you certainly won’t have a second chance otherwise.
I’m sorry, Dave. That is really unfortunate! I wonder if it would do any good if you contacted them and explained what happened to see if they might let you do it again?