Being a student is already a fulltime commitment, so taking on any added responsibilities should be done mindfully and with plenty of planning ahead. However, most students nowadays could use more financial stability, so the need for part-time jobs is growing. Then again, your coursework and projects often require you to have flexible hours, and once you add the pandemic into the mix, you realize that work from home is your best bet to stay afloat, financially speaking.

As a student, you can greatly benefit from working in customer service from the comfort of your dorm or home, provided that you have the right people skills and the affinity for helping others. Although there are certain positions in this niche that are predominant and widely available, you can learn more about different opportunities in this field that might be more suitable for you. Here are a few options to keep in mind, so that you can enjoy your uni days even more without the added stress of worrying about money. 

 

Social media as a customer service port 

One of the most lucrative and exciting ways to join the world of customer support is to work as a representative on social media. You already know your way around Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter, and if a business would like to use any social media channel to provide customer support, this is where you can thrive.

Customers often reach out to brands via instant messaging apps on social media, so you need to be available during specified hours to provide immediate help and respond to questions. This is one of the best student jobs you can do from home and make a decent living. 

 

Virtual assistants on the rise 

Virtual assistants nowadays cover a range of different tasks, from helping customers schedule appointments to resolve customer issues in a ticketing system. Then again, virtual assistants can also be hired by businesses that need remote personal assistants, so you can get a chance to work with an entrepreneur or a CEO instead. 

 

Join a call centre for customer support

If you don’t like the idea of calling people to ask for their opinions or to offer additional help with their purchases, then perhaps this is a better option for you, because customers will call you when they need help. What you’d need for such a job to work remotely is a voice-over internet protocol connection, or VoIP for short, and a solid internet connection. 

You can learn more about VoIP technology and then make use of all available features for your job. Depending on the provider, you’ll be able to use the built-in chat, call analytics, and recording to be able to improve your performance over time and understand customers better.  This will also help you to better understand the nature, and importance of, customer service flow. All of that will ultimately help you build up your communication skills for work after uni! 

 

Tech support in various industries

If you’re already fairly versed in IT support, this would be a perfect match for your skills and your desire to work from home. However, if you don’t have any experience in tech support, you might need to obtain some level of training in order to help customers when they have specific tech issues. 

More often than not, tech support can be done via email, chat, as well as phone calls, so you can make arrangements to provide assistance in the most suitable way for you and your schedule. Moreover, tech remote support is becoming more and more popular nowadays, allowing to find remote positions as well.

 

Home-based travel agents 

This year hasn’t been fair to us all, so most of us have been unable to travel to our favourite holiday spots. However, as travel slowly restores to some semblance of normal, and companies resume their business travels, too, remote travel agents will become an even greater necessity. You can work from home to help people choose the safest, most appropriate destinations, and help them organize their travel agenda accordingly.

Then again, you can do the same for a dedicated company whose employees need to travel on a regular basis because their work demands it. You can work with specialized offers such as cruises, theme holidays, all the way to those all-inclusive resorts.

 

Conducting research from home

Improving customer experience is one of the most pivotal goals for any business across all industries. To do that, however, companies need to collect relevant customer data and regularly conduct surveys. You can work as a survey specialist or phone interviewer to call previous customers and current clients to ask them about their experience with the business in question. 

This can be repetitive work, but you will certainly develop your communication skills and learn how to respond in case there’s a negative comment. This is another position where the use of VoIP can be very handy, even though some companies enable their employees to conduct email surveys and collect data that way, too. They can also use software like Plus to organize and easily visualize the data they have collected.

 

Find your speciality in sales 

No matter how much technology advances to take over certain portions of what we do, sales will always be an invaluable skill you can later turn into a lucrative career after you graduate. In all fairness, sales entail a number of crucial skills that work together to help you increase the sales of a business, but when you work in the customer service department, you can utilize these skills in the department for lead generation, or for successful up-sells and cross-sells. 

Depending on the company, you will develop different skills. For example, if you work in insurance, you can call or email people in order to qualify them for different policies, offer upgrades, and check if their needs have been met, or if they have family members who need coverage, too. 

Working in customer service requires patience and stellar communication skills, but it also allows students the perfect flexibility to keep studying and working with ease. These are some of the most sought-after positions nowadays, so you can look for companies offering these and similar positions to keep your finances in check and to lead a more financially secure life as a student until you’re ready to join the workforce full-time.