Postmates: Remote Order Support – Behind The Scenes

This story isn’t ‘directly’ related to East Nashville – but rather for the Postmates that work in East Nashville. We came across this information from another tipster who still works within the Postmates infrastructure, and wanted to shed some light on how one group within the new startup operates – and why Postmates do some of the things they do – these are the folks that can make or break a Postmate’s day. Meet Remote Order Support Group. These folks are not Customer Service, or Job Support, but rather the group that calls in the orders on behalf of your Postmates delivery driver. We searched the web to see if any of this had been published or released before, and it hasn’t so we wanted to share it with those that were curious. Besides, we figure East Nashville deserves a day of vacation, right?

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This group of ‘remote’ workers get to work entirely from their home, they get to set their own hours, and can change schedules any time they please. However, they are technically 1099 contractors, which means they have to deal with their own tax situations, etc. So you might imagine this sounds like a good job, right? Let’s talk about pay structure and how their job goes:

When you place an order on the Postmates app, it goes into a giant web based queue, combined with all other cities. These remote order workers will see the order, which they call a ‘claim’. The will either place the order for the postmate courier, or contact the courier with instructions to place the order itself, or even cancel it entirely. For each of these ‘claims’ (aka orders) they process, they get paid. Yes, they are paid per order, and they can get bonuses on top of each order, with the proper customer service rating. Still with us? Good.

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Currently each claim/order they process is worth 0.53 cents Mon-Fri, and 0.58 cents on the weekends. And of course there are bonuses involved – as with any production based pay system. The most recent bonus was for this past weekend (12/12 & 12/13) in which call was worth an additional 0.10 cents – if you met certain requirement, of course. So this past weekend, if you met all the requirements (which was 200 claims called, and 75 of those on Sunday) – you could have made as much as 0.68 cents per call. Each support person averages 200 calls per day – so just this past weekend the average remote order caller would have made and average of $136 per each day, $272 for the entire weekend. Of course since they are 1099 you can count about 30% of that out in taxes and similar deductions since the company doesn’t take it out on their behalf. So that brings the weekend total down to around $190, or $95 per each day. They average about 10 hours (not necessarily consecutive) each day, so they are looking at an average of about $9.50 after taxes are paid out. Not a great wage, but they are welcome to work in their pajamas, don’t have to pay for babysitting, can log on/off as much as they want throughout the day. So, in theory it’s not a terrible work from home wage, and does have it’s benefits. Now, of course, if you don’t hit all of the bonus requirement (what if too many workers are logged in, and not enough orders/claims coming in from customers for you to hit your 200 call target?) – some things are simply beyond their control – yet can have a major impact on their pay. That 9.50 is quickly reduced if they don’t hit this bonus requirement, or only work during the week. the same 2 days on a Monday/Tuesday, for instance, would only net them $7.40 per hour, barely minimum wage (and NOT in some states).

One of the most frequently asked questions by Postmates is ‘Why didn’t anyone call my order in’ or ‘Why didn’t they want to wait on hold?’ – well if you were paid per phone call you had to make, and had a queue of money looking at you, you wouldn’t wait on hold, either.

Here are some of the job support aides and decision trees the remote order team uses to stay consistent:

The official ‘What Do I Do’ chart:

COT: When the order support doesn’t do anything, defers to the courier to place the order upon arrival.
EJ: Escalating an order to someone above you (aka Customer Support) – the goal is <5%.

How Long? How Often? :

And finally – Can they order that?

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Believe it or not, these are basically the only job aides and ‘job guides’ that new remote order support employees are given. There is an online work community (postmates.slack.com) for asking questions, posting concerns, etc… but it’s basically a very straight forward job – even if it’s one that’s hard to make a consistent living from.

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