Employment: Great Telecommuting Jobs Applicable For The Veterans

If you can talk on the phone, you can be an at-home customer service representative.

Most companies that hire CSRs provide free, in-house training on their policies and procedures — a plus if your finances are limited.

There’s normally no experience necessary and pay rates average around $13.26 per hour for entry level employment.

Additionally, this job is multi-dimensional, with a whole range of issues fielded by savvy CSRs, including:

• Troubleshooting
• Technical assistance
• Help choosing plans/options
• Error resolution
• Ordering assistance

On any given day, a CSR might find themselves performing any or all of the following tasks:

• Provide information by phone or e-mail regarding products or services
• Document all customer contacts and subsequent actions taken
• Modify customer accounts per customer interaction
• Receive orders and implement billing or payments
• Listen to customers’ concerns and respond in a timely manner
• Research answers to customer inquiries as needed
• Process returns and resolve complaints
• Direct customers to appropriate personnel when necessary

Because of the diversity of tasks and the fast-paced environment, an at-home CSR is rarely bored. This is a great job for someone who likes to be busy and loves interacting with diverse personalities.

General Electric (GE) is well-known as a military-friendly company. They offer their own in-house program to help veterans find jobs within the company, and the GE Retail Finance Division has openings for telecommuting CSR jobs for their call center.

If you were a nurse or had medical experience in the military, you can parlay that experience to one of the many telecommuting jobs for nurses.

Positions for telecommuting nurses and the duties for each vary widely. Some examples include:

Virtual care nurse: Collaborates with an on-the-ground medical team to formulate a primary care plan, monitors patient progress, responds to patient problems, provides advice on interventions, and more.

Nursing advice line operator: Provides advice and coaching to patients based on their individual health situation, supports patients in selecting a physician closely matched to their needs, coordinates services and referrals as necessary, and assesses and manages current health concerns through triage.

Remote nurse auditor: Investigates medical records for fraud, waste, and abuse; identifies coding and insurance discrepancies in regard to Medicaid/Medicare; and drafts letters documenting instances of fraud, waste, and abuse to the appropriate authorities.

Prior authorization nurse: Using benefit plan documents, determines services that require prior authorization; contacts providers for clinical information in regard to prior authorization; and answers questions of providers and consumers regarding benefit application.

Data mining and analytics: Conducts comprehensive assessment of patient’s health care needs, develops a primary plan based on the assessment, implements appropriate interventions as per the plan, and evaluates plan effectiveness.

There are many other subcategories of telecommuting jobs within the nursing and medical technology field, offering veterans with a nursing or medical background a wide range of choices.

Humana, owner of subsidiary Humana Military Healthcare Services, Inc., has myriad opportunities for veterans, reservists, and military spouses. Their work-at-home opportunities for the medical field include chart auditors, physicians, and medical coders.

Health Net, a health insurance company, is always looking for case managers, care coordinators, and nurses to work on a telecommuting basis. They actively recruit military spouses.

The Hartford, a large multi-faceted insurance company, has telecommuting positions for nurses and insurance adjusters, and claims consultants.

Similar to customer service representatives, call service agents can comfortably work from home and even set their own hours in many cases.

Most call centers have specific procedures used when dealing with customer issues or complaints and they provide in-house training to familiarize new employees with the particulars.

U-Haul was begun by a veteran at the end of World War II, so it’s no surprise that they’d offer veterans a way to re-enter the job market after service. Duties for their call-center positions include answering customer questions, providing roadside assistance via telephone, and taking reservations.

Alorica, a contact management solutions company, has positions for veterans handling billing and troubleshooting issues on an hourly, per-minute, or per-call rate.

Freelance writing has a strong history of being a viable work-from-home job. As such, there are a lot of lucrative writing jobs for veterans with skills in creative or technical writing.

Creative writers can use those skills to write a fiction or non-fiction book of your own or develop content for the many online venues that require assistance in this area.

Assignments can include writing blog posts, designing web-pages, writing informational filler, and developing click-bait articles, among other things.

Those with a more journalistic bent can develop a story idea and query magazines that would be likely to be interested in the topic. Although these jobs are typically few and far between, they pay significantly more than many others in the freelance writing market.

Finally, many companies need people with technical writing skills to develop instructional manuals, product information sheets, and even training materials that cater to highly technical readers.

Veterans EZ Info, Inc., a company with deep roots in the Healthcare IT and Benefits industries, is owned by a service-disabled veteran, so they have a heart for helping veterans get back into the game.

They have had opportunities for technical writers to join their staff of telecommuting workers.

Don’t discount a job in tele-sales —these aren’t like the telemarketing jobs of yore. Today’s telecommuting sales jobs offer a lot more excitement, responsibility, and benefits.

The best thing about telemarketing or tele-sales is that you can choose your area of sales interest. And if you get tired of selling, say, insurance plans, you can easily switch industries once you have experience working sales on the phone.

Many people pass over tele-sales jobs because they dislike the idea of cold-calling, but today’s varied sales positions offer varying levels of customer contact.

In fact, there are many telemarketing positions available where the hard work of getting a likely sales candidate on the line is already done for you. All you have to do is dive in and clinch the sale.

Other positions while not technically sales, involve taking the customer through the process of payment and ensuring that their order is entered correctly.

There are also jobs labeled as tele-sales that involve surveying customers for feedback to improve products or services.

At higher levels, there are telemarketing jobs that have other duties assigned alongside, like developing training materials for future telemarketers and acting as a consultant to campaign manager to develop multi-channel sales programs.

In fact, a telemarketing job can even grow into a standard marketing position or lead to management opportunities.

Examples of typical industries that offer tele-sales jobs are:

• Insurance
• Investments
• Business-to-business services
• Subscriptions
• Non-profits
• Political campaigns
• Health care
• Warranty services
• Automobiles

Of course, nearly any product or service can easily be served by a good outbound marketing team, a fact that is supported by the large number of telemarketing sales jobs available on various job boards.

While there was no one company that stood out for supporting veterans, there are several companies that regularly post telemarketing positions on the various telecommuting job networks, such as AMVETS and the Purple Heart Foundation.

Data entry professionals are an enormously important part of many corporations and organizations, large and small.

They are responsible for processing large amounts of data in a smooth and efficient manner to keep companies running at optimal efficiency. Yet, if you can write and type, you can be a data processor.

Today’s telecommuting jobs forums also refer to these professionals as:

• Word processor
• Typist
• Clerk
• Keypunch technician
• Transcriptionist
• Coder
• Captioner
• Information manager
• Database technician

The job descriptions for these positions vary widely. Some of the duties can include, but are not limited to:

• Running and distributing reports
• Collecting and inputting data for research
• Coordinating imports and downloads
• Auditing datasets
• Using analytics to pull reports
• Verifying data
• Categorize data and construct documentation
• Process online transactions
• Manage database records
• File, sort, and distribute information

Data entry positions pay from $13 to over $19 per hour for entry-level positions and they’re a great way to break into the telecommuting industry.

Reliable data entry professionals who are looking for higher pay or more responsibility can move into management positions.

Although no one company stood out for dedication to veterans in this subcategory, there are many data entry jobs listed on popular forums such as flexjobs.com and Indeed.