Regular readers know we like new buzzwords here at Small Business Labs and "fractional availability" is a new one to us.
We found it in the GigaOm article The Game Changing Economics of Fractional Availability.
The article covers the on-demand customer care company Directly. They provide on-demand apps that allow companies to recruit and pay power users to answer customer support questions.
Companies use Directly apps to route support questions to a talent pool of skilled users and reward them with cash or credit when they answer a customer question.
In other words, these on-demand customer service reps are not professional call center staff, nor do they work scheduled hours or defined shifts. They choose the types support questions they want to handle and when they want to work.
When they are fractionally available - meaning when they have some spare time - they can choose to generate income by answering support questions.
Directly has a number of customers, including Pinterest, Lyft, Airbnb and others so their approach seems to work.
They have an interesting blog post on one of their top "experts" and why he does on-demand customer service work. Key quote:
When Mark isn’t building homes, he supplements his income with Directly. On a typical day, Mark wakes up to have a cup of coffee and answers questions to customers who replied to him while sleeping.
He then starts answering questions of more customers until there are none left. The rest of Mark’s day he spends going back and forth between construction work and Directly.
Mark is a prime example of the new knowledge worker, choosing when, where and what he works on.
And more importantly, he is able to follow his passion and live life on his own terms.
This is a pretty standard on-demand worker story. He's supplementing his income with highly flexible part-time work.
Two recent studies have confirmed this is the reason most people are working in the on-demand economy. Our study with Intuit is one. The other comes from the JP Morgan Chase Institute.
"Fractional availability" may or may not make it as a buzzword. But it's clear fractional availability is increasingly being turned into work opportunities via the on-demand economy.
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