Not even $9 per hour INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR and Zero Benefits - Anonymous employee The Chat Shop Employee Review

Hey there! Thanks for the feedback. We are sorry that your experience with The Chat Shop did not match our intention of being the best place you have ever worked. We are committed to creating a fun, transparent, and collaborative environment for all of our employees and are proud of our recent happiness score of 8.79/10, so we’re disappointed to hear about your experiences, and feel they aren’t a reflection of our team’s sentiment. We value and consider all feedback and we’ll continue to find ways to improve but we wanted to address a couple of your specific concerns here. As The Chat Shop grows, we’re continuously searching for ways to supercharge our team's satisfaction. It’s the most important thing to us, as happy chatters make for happy customers. We are very proud of our flat structure here at The Chat Shop; we encourage our team to voice any and all concerns they may have. From the first interview, we let candidates know that our US-based chat agents are employed as independent contractors with an hourly pay of US$9.50, rising to US$10.00 following successful completion of probation. We’re in the process of creating a full US entity that will better allow us to better serve our US team members as full employees. Part of growing is learning where we can be better and this is just one way we’re addressing this head on. From a workload perspective, we do all we can, from first interview onwards, to demonstrate the work is demanding. With mock scenarios, clear working expectations and vetting for multi-tasking all in place, we try to screen for and illustrate that this responsibility requires more than your run of the mill desk job. Whilst we’re aware our US benefits programme needs some development and are addressing that, we do all we can to provide other benefits that are harder to deliver. All of our agent team have control over their own working schedule. We are happy to accommodate personal and professional obligations when assigning shift patterns to our agents; university students and new parents are among our friends and colleagues here at The Chat Shop. All team members have a direct messenger channel, with no access restriction, to the founders. Anyone can use this to provide feedback, raise grievances or (more often than not) send a virtual high five. Each month we share all company data with everyone, and do whatever we can to over communicate as we know it’s our team that’s the secret sauce to our success. We’re happy to say that for most people we get this right, but appreciate you taking the time to share how we can get even better in the future. If you would like to share more about your experience please contact us by emailing hello@thechatshop.co.uk so that we can set up a time to talk. Thank you again for the feedback; it helps us make The Chat Shop a better place! - Joe, Co-Founder and Director of Operations