My way as a remote employee :-)

I have long wanted to write a similar article, but there was still no time, although it is not there now, but there is a reason. Six months ago, I worked in a company that created websites for local companies (Penza). Everything was as usual, but only now the management of the company divorced and it became unbearable to live in the company. The director says one thing, but the director is different and often they had opposite opinions. In general, the company was engaged in various tasks, in addition to the basic duties, it was necessary to make up and program in PHP, even had to make friends with Windows Server 2003. But the period came when it was simply impossible to work and I left.

On the recommendation of a close friend decided to look for work on the Internet. Made a resume, sent to several companies and posted a few ads on the forums. There were various proposals, including funny ones. After a month of searching, I selected three offers, but all three were from serious projects, but were not very clear in terms of duties and payment. Even at the beginning of the search, an acquaintance recommended one company to me, and I came to this company on the recommendation and got a job, discarding the other three sentences. She settled on the 8-hour work shift for the post of technical support officer. Work remote to a known hosting company. Now I decided to tell Habrachchiteli about their semi-annual path.


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The first month was the most intense in terms of the consumption of new information. Although in the past work I was constantly working with hosting companies, but working from the other side in the first month opened up a lot of new information for me. I learned a few things and studied a mountain of information, read customer references and studied control panels. The first feeling was that it was a big anthill, where everyone went about his business, interacting with others through various means of communication (jabber, icq, wiki, forums, planners, phones, etc.). The lion's share of employees works remotely, and from different countries. It seemed to me that all interactions occur so quickly that it will be difficult to work at such a pace, but I got involved quickly. Here, the whole point turned out to be simple - when the pace of work is great, then the hour is replaced by the hour very unnoticed and sometimes it is insulting when time flies too fast, because it seems that the day is so much, but at the end of the day you see that the day is so little.

The company always has something to do besides the main responsibilities, and there is always the opportunity to realize your idea, if you really have something to realize. I took up a few trifles and somehow in the process of work I began to additionally engage in the analysis of reviews on the Internet for our services. When a company has thousands of customers, there is always a group of dissatisfied. Of course, like any company, there are drawbacks, but there are also advantages. There is nothing perfect and it is especially difficult to predict the risks associated with the provision of services by third parties (equipment suppliers, telecommunications operators, energy, etc.). Most of the risks can be cached, but, unfortunately, not always. So gradually, I became involved in analyzing and resolving customer complaints, and this grew into my additional responsibility, and I received the right to officially reply to letters sent to the management, providing the management with a report.

In addition, she was simultaneously engaged in advertising contacts and additional instructions. It was at this time that I learned about Habré and other TM projects and met some employees. On business issues, one has to contact various companies and over time various business contacts have appeared. In addition to solving work issues, sometimes we play chess, cards, or just discuss the news. These are the interactions between companies.

In general, every month she implemented various ideas, more and more new business acquaintances appeared. Because I deal with a client complaints review in a company, then I encounter several gaps in service, in which clients also periodically reproach us. I conducted a survey among regular customers to identify the main problems and assess the quality of work. Recommendations from customers for the finalization of the control panel were transferred to the development section and some of them were implemented during the week. We are constantly looking for any new products, but, unfortunately, there are very few really worthwhile ones. Recently, we began to use the Megaplan, which helps in the work, and also changed the web interface of the mail client. Now we are finalizing the control panel, as well as launching a new Windows VPS service. Anyone who has experienced the Microsoft licensing process knows that this is not an easy and quick process.

For my part, I wanted to do something big that I am doing now and it looks like this is some kind of illness. Every month I want to do more than I did in the past, but once the time limit comes, I thought about automation tools. At the same time, I graduated from the institute with a degree in Engineering for Automated Control Systems, so I saw various automation systems and I know what is possible within the framework of modern technologies.

Thus, I came to the idea of ​​a new department in the company. When you work in technical support, you come to understand that there is a chapel in online service. When there are few customers, you can devote a lot of time to one customer, but there are peak hours in the work during which you manage to serve customers within the norm and no more. Therefore, there are various situations when a client comes to the chat, asks for something outside the operator, and you go to meet him. At another time, he comes to the chat again with the same, but already at rush hour and to another operator, and the operator is dissatisfied with the answer, because he could not help him. In addition, you serve many clients per shift and you cannot physically remember them all, so that the client doesn't explain the same thing ten times, doesn't storm the mail, etc.

My idea was a new approach to customer service - a mixture of various forms of technical automation, an individual approach, quality control and the principle of one window. The minimum of actions from the client, the fastest and high-quality solution of the request. I described the idea in detail to the management, after which it took a long time to discuss the concept. In this idea there are a lot of unknown values ​​that will be calculated in the course of work, for example, the average time to resolve the issue and the average number of hits, I suggested gradually increasing the number of clients, starting with the largest for each type of tariffs (virtual hosting, VPS, rental of dedicated servers ). Because it is not known how much labor will be needed to provide the best service to a single client, it is impossible to calculate all the costs.

The concept was called “ VIP-service ” ( vip-service.mchost.ru ). Do not think that VIP-service is only the lot of selected customers who spend a lot of money to pay for services. For us, it is not only and not so much that the sum of the client's expenses for our services is important, as the presence of permanent ones with quality websites. The main objective of the VIP service is to reach as many customers as possible without losing the high quality of service. It took more than a month to develop and implement the concept and launch the work of the VIP service department, and I took the position of the head of the VIP service department of McHost.Ru . Such a story of my work as a remote employee of the company.

Unfortunately, in most companies of the IT sector, where remote employees can be used, they do not do this, although I believe that you can work remotely as well in many positions. still people are in the office and use the same communication tools as remote employees. Much, if not all, depends on the views and desires of the management of the companies.

I described my story not as a freelancer, but a remote employee from technical support to the head of the VIP service department. Perhaps someone will be interested to know that there are such modern forms of work that I personally did not know about before.