Help Desk Support Assistant

*Important:* Read this whole post. If you can't follow these instructions I'll assume you can't follow any instructions and I won't reply to your application. I'm looking for an *enthusiastic and friendly support assistant* to help me grow my business. You'll mostly be handling front line customer support for my range of windows software, WordPress plugins and information products, but you might also be asked to help out with other things like collecting information, updating a wordpress blog with given material, and other assistant tasks. My team consists of a handful of people across several countries. We continually develop, launch and sell our own range of information products and software. What we expect from you: *You're a great communicator.* All of our support is email based (we use a support desk system), and internally we use Skype and emails to keep in touch, and a project/team management tool called Zoho to keep track of tasks — that means lots of reading and writing. *You speak good English.* Our software and support is all done in English. Some of our customers don't have perfect English, so yours needs to be that much better to compensate. *You can commit to 5–10 hours per week.* Our support volume varies with our launches. We usually have at least 5 hours of work per week even in the quiet times, but you should be available for at least 10 hours per week in the busy times. *You can work every weekday.* Customers email us every day. We try to respond to everyone within 24 hours even if it's just to tell them we're working on their problem. If you can only log in two days a week, you won't be able to help us. *You can work in our timezone.* You won't know the answer for every customer. Sometimes you'll need to ask someone else. That's a lot easier if you're online at the same time as us. Most of our team works on European time, so you should be able to be online during daytime GMT. *You're reliable.* When you have a sick day or a vacation, you let us know that you won't be around. What you're not going to do is vanish for two weeks without telling us and then expect everything to be fine. You're smart enough to know we're not going to appreciate that. *You're calm and collected.* Most of our customers are lovely, but even lovely people can get frustrated when stuff doesn't work. They all need to be treated with respect, no matter how rude they can be. *You have some basic technical background, e.g. you're familiar with WordPress.* Honestly, this one isn't essential, but it would definitely set you ahead. A lot of our products are software (Windows desktop applications and WordPress plugins). So knowing the basics of how to set up a blog and install and update plugins, or how to install software on a Windows computer will help you with a lot of support queries. There are also other tasks like publishing something on our blog for which we might need you - again, if you have the necessary skills to do things like that, it helps. To apply send me a note and tell us why you want to work with us. You should include your timezone and hourly rate, any relevant experience and skills, and a brief description of a time you made a customer happy. The subject line of your application should say "This will make the OQ happy". We're looking forward to your application!