The wish to live abroad.
I used to live in a cold country in the Nordics, Sweden. I never liked the winter with snow and ice. But for a long time, I dreamed about moving away from Sweden to a warmer country. I used to joke about being born in the wrong country. As I said, this is a crazy idea, I have had for a long time.
Nevertheless, there has always been one thing that makes me hesitate, how will I make money and survive? My experience and former jobs include customer service, contact center, and sales representative. I also worked for a big logistics company in HK in the USA. And my boss was in the European headquarters in Amsterdam. Therefore, all the work and meetings were in English, so I would have no problem working in an international environment with English-speaking businesses and companies. So I started looking for jobs where you don’t have to live in one specific country. As I metioned, I want to travel ,and see the world, and work as a freelancer.
I quickly discovered that many international and Swedish companies are looking to hire people for their contact centers. And that you can work as a freelance where ever you live.
Contact center/Call center
I always wonder what the difference between customer service and contact center is. I don’t really don’t know. But customer service more or less just working with the phone as a call center, taking inbound calls, making outbound calls, and often handling a high volume of calls. At the same time, a contact center works with different channels. It does many other things: invoicing, some marketing, and usually taking care of the social media and the chat channel. This is my opinion about the differences and also my experience from my former jobs.
Outsourcing as a booster
When I started to look around for jobs, I also realized that companies often choose to outsource their contact centers. For example, Swedish companies need Swedish-speaking staff but only hiring the staff through other companies. And this is perfect for me because when you are not working for a specific company you don’t need to be at their particular office you can live all over the world.
This is probably also why I, from the beginning, needed help finding jobs. I looked around some specific companies’ homepages for work but yet to find them. Now, I found some companies with many different jobs to offer from companies that choose to outsource their projects. When you decide to work like this with other positions for various companies, you get a lot of good experience. Working in an international contact center means I can use all my experience, and I know I do a great job.
As you probably already figured out, I quit my permanent job in Sweden a while ago and have started my adventure worldwide. So if you have a similar crazy idea like me, I can just say: Go for it! Working in an international environment at a contact center like this at least suits me!
And a good company that works internationally and can help you with your dream of becoming a freelance worker is Katrium.