Amazon is growing at a fantastic pace and with more sellers and buyers, and more sales, comes a need for more support staff. And in the US Amazon is embracing the gig economy and looking to employ 5000 home based customer support roles to service the burgeoning marketplace.
Amazon is making a massive drive at recruiting support staff in the US. Amazon has said that it intends to create 25000 regular part time posts in 2017 and a total of 100k full time posts in the coming 18 months.
The home worker jobs enjoy many of the benefits of similar full-time posts and the new employees will get health insurance, sick pay, paid holidays and tuition allowances. The new positions will be in 26 US states and it seems that these part time workers will likely be limited to evening and weekend work only. The hourly rate will be $10 per hour.
Funnily, home based customer support staff, often working out of traditional hours, was a model much used by the likes of eBay back in the 90s. And it’s a model that makes much sense as long as you have a flawless internet connection and good internal systems. If you consider how you would deal with emails, they come in down a funnel and can be dealt with by anyone anywhere. And in a 24/7 business it’s vital to have staff all over who follow the sun or work flexibly. Home workers also don’t drain resources by needing an office desk space.
Thus far this is a US initiative, but it could be an interesting experiment here in the UK too.
3 Responses
The majority of Amazon Seller Support staff are a complete waste of time and struggle with anything more complex than feedback removal. Cases can stay open for months without resolution. I can’t see the use of homeworkers making the situation any better if a case deviates from their script and working in isolation will make it more difficult for patterns to be spotted.
I presume Amazon is talking about consumer customer support, as they certainly don’t seem to be bothered about Merchant customer support.
If you are lucky they can read the idiot prompt cards in understandable English but woe betide you if the help you need is not on an idiot card.