January 2017

16 Work from Home Chat Jobs Currently Hiring

Last Updated:December 2, 2022

If you’re looking for a remote customer service job that you can do from home but you don’t have the luxury of a noiseless workspace, then work from home chat jobs may just be the perfect fit for you.

Kids, pets, and other sources of background noise may make it completely impossible for you to talk to someone over the phone from your home. In addition, if you have social anxiety, you may find it extremely difficult to speak on the phone with anyone.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t work remotely!

Many companies hire people who can communicate with their clients and customers via email or online chat, enabling you to make money from helping others while not having to speak on the phone.

You can even take your work to coffee shops, restaurants, playgrounds, your local library, or any other place where you can access the internet without having to worry about the background noise.

Today, you’ll learn about work from home chat jobs: what they entail, the requirements, and companies who are currently offering this opportunity.

What Does A Work-From-Home Chat Job Involve?

To put it simply, work-from-home chat agents communicate with a company’s customers through text messaging, instant messaging, or email.

They’re normally asked to provide customer service by answering questions, resolving issues, and handling complaints.

What Are The Requirements To Be a Remote Chat Agent?

The minimum technical requirements are a computer that can run the software of choice of the company you plan to work for and a stable internet connection (i.e., DSL, cable, or fiber only; no satellite or wireless internet).

Aside from technical requirements, you also need to have soft skills such as fast typing skills (companies usually require a 30 to 40 wpm minimum) excellent written communication, attentiveness, empathy, independence, and extensive knowledge of the company’s offerings, products, and services.

A high school diploma or GED will normally suffice unless you’re offering support that requires you to have specific knowledge in a field. For instance, if you’re providing chat support for a medical product or drug, you’re often required to have at least a bachelor’s degree in a health-related field.

16 Companies Offering Work From Home Chat Jobs

Check out the list of companies below that offer online chat jobs. Some of the sites might say they’re currently not hiring. Don’t fret, though; bookmark these pages and check back from time to time and see if jobs have opened up.

1. FlexJobs

In contrast to the other companies on this list, FlexJobs is actually a job board where companies list various jobs.

The great thing about FlexJobs is that the companies that they allow to list here are carefully vetted. No job scammers are allowed here!

That saves you time and energy researching and vetting these companies yourself.

Plus, if you sign up as a member, you’ll have career coaches available to help you review your résumé and host mock interviews to get you on the road to your desired career.

Browse all the work at home chat job openings available now.

2. Apple

Apple occasionally hires work-at-home chat agents for its customer service and technical support divisions.

These 20 hour/week virtual positions get snapped up fast, so it pays to check the company’s job board often.

If you do land a chat support position with Apple, the company will send you your own computer for free!

Apple chat agents should be familiar with the company’s products and have some prior experience in customer service or live chat support. According to GlassDoor, Apple chat agents earn as much as $20.50/hour.

3. Arise

The Arise Platform connects individual customer service agents and customer service companies to provide customer support for businesses and brands.

As an individual, you’ll need to register as a customer service agent and find opportunities with a virtual call center already working with the Arise Platform.

The usual form of customer service they provide is telephone customer service, but they also provide live chat and email support.

The good thing about registering for the Arise Platform is that it provides an opportunity for you to eventually open your own call center business and handle your own team of work-from-home chat agents if you want to.

4. Best Buy

Best Buy continually hires remote tech support chat agents who can troubleshoot Apple and Microsoft products, as well as some mobile apps, as part of its Geek Squad workforce.

Geek Squad agents must have at least one year of technical troubleshooting experience and reside in the USA (except for California, Alaska, Washington, and Puerto Rico).

5. Wayfair

Wayfair’s entire customer support team is remote and these are permanent positions.

They have openings all over the world and you can earn more if you are bilingual, but that’s not required.

6. Support.com

This company maintains a global network of work-at-home chat and call agents to provide customer and technical support for its clients, which are typically small- to medium-sized businesses.

Thus, you’ll need to have some tech support experience to successfully snag a position with Support.com.

Once hired, you’ll be able to schedule and work shifts that pay $11 per hour. There is also a mandatory training period, complete with a background check.

7. OutPLEX

This company is currently hiring Work at Home Customer Service Representatives.

You must possess a fairly good command of the English language, have a typing speed of 30 to 50 WPM, and have sales experience.

The pay for work at home chat agents ranges from $9-$14/hour; agents also earn commissions.

8. TeleTech

This company hires customer service and technical support representatives to work with various clients.

With TeleTech, you are hired on as an employee, and the company does require that you pass a series of MatchPoint tests before you are hired. You must also pass a drug test.

Work shifts with this company range from 4 to 6 hours; most TeleTech clients require that you work a minimum of 20 hours a week. The pay ranges from $9 to $11 per hour.

9. The Chat Shop

Companies that need chat agents for their own websites work with The Chat Shop to hire such agents.

Available positions vary from sales to customer service to technical support, and all positions come with paid training.

To qualify as a chat agent you’ll need to demonstrate a typing speed of 80 WPM, be meticulous and organized, and be able to work 35 to 40 hours per week.

Chat agents work remotely, and the pay scale starts at $10 per hour.

10. Uber

This company hires so-called “Community Support Representatives” who work remotely to provide email support to Uber drivers and users.

The duties of CSRs include answering inquiries about a service, reporting a problem/complaint, and escalating an issue when deemed necessary.

Uber CSRs are expected to work 40 hours per week, with some of those hours spent on weekends. According to GlassDoor, CSRs earn $13 to $15 per hour.

11. Sedgwick

Sedgwick helps people handle their insurance claims.

They have quite a few work-from-home chat job opportunities available. Enter “work at home” in the search bar of their careers section to find the available positions.

Bilingual speakers are offered higher compensation rates.

12. Sitel

Sitel is a business process outsourcing (BPO) company that currently has multiple work-from-home chat job openings for various clients.

If your application is successful, you’ll be employed full time (up to 40 hours per week) and will be eligible for benefits, such as paid overtime, medical, dental, and vision benefits, and a 401k.

13. Everise

Everise is another global BPO currently hiring sales support agents to answer product and sales inquiries through chat channels.

At least six months of sales experience is required for this position. Bilingual Spanish/English agents are welcome to apply and have a higher pay scale.

14. ERC

ERC is yet another international BPO serving various industries, such as financial institutions, healthcare, media, and many more.

They are looking for both part-time and full-time work-at-home customer service agents to handle chat inquiries. Starting pay is $9.50 to $10.50 per hour.

15. Anthology

Anthology is an educational platform enabling learners and educators to interact in a virtual classroom.

They continually hire customer support and technical support live chat agents to assist users who have inquiries and technical issues with software.

16. Omni Interactions

Omni Interactions employs a wide network of gig workers (who they call Gig Brand Ambassadors or GBAs) to provide customer support to their clients via phone, email, live chat, text, and social media.

Currently, they only have openings for phone and email support agents, but add this page to your bookmarks and check back for new openings for chat agents.

How much do work-at-home chat jobs pay?

The majority of remote chat jobs salary falls within the $13 to $18 per hour range. Some pay less, while others pay more. Some companies will pay more and offer benefits, but those are rare and extremely competitive. Some positions are more sales based and will include commissions on top of an hourly rate as well.

Pay is always equivalent to the amount of work and effort needed. Work at home chat jobs are fairly easy and do not require much experience.

You should mainly be using these types of jobs for extra income with part-time work, or as an opportunity to get your foot in the door at a larger company.

The Bottom Line

Chat jobs hold a distinct advantage over more traditional customer support jobs: you get to do all of the work and never have to talk on the phone.

If you’re looking to land a work-from-home chat job, start with one of the above companies.

Being a chat agent is probably the most flexible and has the least barrier to entry of customer service jobs. However, this is also one of the lowest-paying jobs.

Check out other customer service jobs you can do from home to potentially find higher-paying remote jobs.

Be sure to check out our full list of work at home jobs as well, which has 90+ ideas listed with hundreds of companies looking for new employees.

Does being an online chat agent seem appealing to you? Which one of these companies are you going to apply to first? Share it with us in the comments!

Making Money from Others: Building a Marketplace Site

Written By:Dean Robinson

Published On: January 13, 2017

As an online entrepreneur you generally have two choices: sell your own products/services or promote other people goods as an affiliate.

These are both great and profitable options, but what if there was a way to create a scalable business that requires no creation of products or inventory?

Well there is, it’s called a marketplace.

What is a Marketplace?

A marketplace is simply a place where people can buyer from multiple sellers in one location, a town market or malls are perfect real world examples.

Online is no different: a single site that allows sellers to add their products and purchasers to browse said products.

This is defined as a Two Sided Marketplace.

There are lots of already well known marketplaces online:

Amazon – allows anyone to sell their stuff, and reach a wider audience.
Etsy – a marketplace for craft and handmade goods.
Airbnb – connecting private accommodation owners with short term renters
Themeforest – providing a home for WordPress theme developers
Fiverr – showcases a wide variety of cheap tasks and services

Why 2 Sided Marketplaces Work

Creating a two sided marketplace has a number of benefits for an entrepreneur.

First off is profit. Depending on the business model you choose, you can skim off the surface of both sides by charging people to list and by adding to the transaction charges for customers.

Obviously you may not want to do one or the other instead of both, but the option is there.

Secondly is that once a marketplace like this is set up, it can become very stable. Sellers have a tendency to stick with the marketplace as moving is difficult and costly.

Take Themeforest for example. If a seller leaves they then need to do their own marketing and if they sell the products on Themeforest and their own site, they get a lower percentage of any sales on Themeforest which could cost them thousands.

This tactic by Themeforest might be heavy handed but it helps keep sellers working with just them.

For buyers

The centralized location makes it much easier for customers to work with: there’s no need for them to go from site to site and waste time on search engines when they can just visit your site and find exactly what they need.

For sellers

A place to list their products with (in theory) no marketing needed to bring in traffic, no need to handle payments and refunds and a targeted audience. It’s perfect for one person or small companies to get their products out there with little work or risk.

It Ain’t Easy

Getting started with an online marketplace is possibly one of the hardest routes to take with ecommerce, but the profits can be incredible.

The Chicken and the Egg

Which came first? It doesn’t really matter of course, but the issue is that if you don’t have sellers, you have no buyers. If you have no buyers, you can’t attract sellers!

This conundrum is the most difficult aspect to overcome.

There are ways though, through what’s called “seeding”. Seeding is effectively jumpstarting a marketplace when you are just starting.

Focus on One Side First

The most common way to start a market place is to build up one side first. For example OpenTable which is a company that handles reservations for restaurants started by just offering restaurants a way to handle reservations electronically.

Only after it got enough restaurants on board did it open up the booking system to customers.

It built up one side, the restaurants, and then let the flood gates open by introducing the customer element.

Offer Something Better

By offering tools or systems that are better than your competitors you can entice sellers/customers over which will bring the other half as well.

Airbnb got traction when they included a tool to post to Airbnb and Craigslist at the same time. With Craigslist’s own posting tool being difficult to use, the easy to use Airbnb system enticed renters with both ease of use and the ability to post to two sites simultaneously.

This allowed them to bring renters over to their platform, while reducing the risk to renters (they still get to post on Craigslist). Having renters posting, meant that customers would actually be interested what they have to offer.

Build Around an Existing Product

This is really only going to work if you’re the owner of said product otherwise you might run into legal issues. The basic idea is to have an extensible product that others can create for; software is great for this. They then sell the products on your site’s marketplace.

The ecommerce systems Woocommerce and Easy Digital Downloads are excellent examples of marketplaces built around a single product.

It’s Slow Going

The thing with marketplaces is that it’s a long haul, there’s no quick buck to be made with them. It takes time to build and seed the marketplace so it’s at a stage where it becomes the de facto place to go for that niche (Etsy for handcrafted stuff, Themeforest for WordPress themes, etc.).

While a lot of marketers expect to get a return within 6 – 12 months for a project, a marketplace can barely even be growing by the time a year has passed.

This makes it difficult to know whether what you’re doing is actually working or not. Pivoting too early means you might lose out on the site blossoming into a marketplace. Hanging onto a dud project may mean an increased financial loss.

Your Niche Matters

Let me be blunt: it’s highly unlikely you will build the next Amazon!

Building a varied marketplace like Amazon takes a lot of time, and money to do. Even Amazon started small and focused on specific products. Even Amazon started off by just selling books.

Instead take a hint from other successful online marketplaces and focus on a niche.

Whatever niche you go with you must make sure it’s a two sided niche that has enough potential or existing sellers to draw from.

Marketplace Platforms

The great thing about building an online marketplace right now is that the costs are much lower than they used to be: no longer do you have to spend thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on a custom built site.

The get a Minimum Viable Product up and running to test out your idea is as simple as creating a WordPress site, and installing an e-commerce plugin and a marketplace theme such as the awesome Marketify.

As well as WordPress most hosted and self-hosted e-commerce systems have a multi-vendor system that allows you to create a marketplace: Magento, Drupal, X-cart and Shopify all have different options you can use to create a marketplace.

As there are so many options available, there’s something for everyone’s budget.

The Bottom Line

As with any online venture building a marketplace has risks, perhaps more than any other way of making money online.

It will take time and dedication to start seeing a profit, but once built marketplaces are incredibly stable and long term businesses.

Earn Cash While You Travel with These Mobile Apps

Written By:Halina Zakowicz

Published On: January 4, 2017

Wintertime is rough. After the holidays pass, the gloomy and cold days of winter settle in and test even the hardiest of souls. Therefore, it makes perfect sense why many freelancers and even employed workers choose to escape to warmer climes.

There’s just one problem with these winter vacations: How do you make money while you’re frolicking in the ocean or drinking your third margarita amidst the cacti? While some of us can take our work with us, many of us can’t.

Luckily, mobile technology has come through with a solution to this dilemma. In fact, it’s come through with several solutions. Here are several mobile apps that help you earn cash while you’re watching that football game in Pasadena (and trying hard not to brag about it to your Facebook friends) or snorkeling amidst the coral reefs of Hawaii.

1. Airmule

Got extra space in your 50 lb limit luggage? That space could end up paying for a good portion of your airfare. Using the Airmule app, you can easily advertise how much space you have available in your personal luggage as well as your flight. Interested parties will then contact you.

If you’re worried about noncompliance with the TSA’s “don’t-accept-packages-from-unknown-persons” rule, know that Airmule vets its senders and their materials so that the items are legal to send and pass all security checkpoints.

Once you land at your destination, you can hand deliver your package to the recipient, or you can request that Airmule complete the handling for you. Hand delivery, incidentally, is compensated extra.

Currently, much of Airmule’s shipping goes from the USA to China; however, other locations are being added.

2. Roadie

Why drive an empty car when you can earn money for that extra space? As a driver with Roadie, you’ll be paid up to $50 for transporting and delivering items locally. However, if you’re about to embark on a long-distance voyage, you could make several hundred bucks per delivery, and especially if that delivery includes a live pet.

Why would someone wish to use your services versus those of the USPS, FedEx or UPS? Oversize items that won’t fit on a plane can cost a pretty penny to ship. Travelers become even more nervous if they’re shipping a prized possession, a delicate family heirloom or a beloved pet. For these reasons, personalized item delivery has become popular through mobile apps such as Roadie.

An added incentive to using Roadie is that you can deduct your mileage, on-the-road hotel stays, and meals as a business expense.

3. Presto InstaShops

This mystery shopping aggregator works with several dozen mystery shopping companies, so you’ll never lack for an assignment that’s close to you. Even better, the app tracks your geographic location and “points out” which shops are closest to you.

When you click on a given geotag, you obtain a short blurb of information about the shop assignment. Should you be interested, you simply click on the assignment and apply for it. If you’re an experienced mystery shopper and/or have a high shopper rating, you can self-assign your shops without waiting for approval- this makes it even more convenient to mystery shop on-the-fly.

Using this app, I’ve been able to do drive-thru assignments without even leaving my car ($4-$6), receive compensation for shopping at an outlet store ($20 in merchandise + $25), and check out tourist attractions for free with bonus cash (tickets + $20).

4. Field Agent

Another on-the-go mystery shopping and odd job app is Field Agent, which pays you up to $20 for quick jobs completed at grocery stores, gas stations, banks or even in your own home.

Example Field Agent jobs include the following:

Scavenger hunt jobs that pay a few dollars to locate an item in your home, store or even at your friend’s house.
Photo submission jobs that ask you to locate a certain store product, endcap, promotion, price or display.
Survey jobs where you answer 5-10 questions and earn a few bucks.

With Field Agent, not all listed stores in your given area will have the app’s requested products or promos. This is why it’s good to be traveling; inevitably, you’ll locate a store that has what you’re looking for.

5. Shopkick

Are you traveling by a mall or grocery store? Then be sure to download and activate Shopkick, the app that pays you to walk into stores and scan merchandise. Successfully completed tasks are rewarded with points (known as kicks) that can be redeemed for gift cards.

It doesn’t take a lot of scanning before you’ve racked up the necessary kicks for a gift card. Some items give you 100 kicks a piece just for being scanned. At 500 kicks, you already have $2 in gift card money.

One of the best ways to make money with Shopkick is to visit shopping malls. There, you might score points at a handful of stores and be able to redeem your earnings right on the spot, before you even return to your vehicle.

Submitted receipts that feature previously scanned items earn anywhere from 100-2500 points. On occasion, you’ll also score points for watching short product videos.

Earning money while on-the-go is possible

The days of foregoing any kind of money-making activities while enjoying your vacation are over. Nowadays, the person who is traveling has several unique opportunities to make money. Many of these opportunities are available via mobile apps. By making money on-the-go, you not only slow down your ‘cash burn’ rate, you might even find a way to extend your time off.