Customer Support Specialist
Somewhere
🇿🇦 Hirezar Summary for South African Applicants
This fully remote full time position at Somewhere is open to applicants from South Africa. This role is suited for junior-level professionals. As a remote position, you can work from anywhere in South Africa — whether you're based in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, or a smaller town.
Job Description
Role: Customer Support SpecialistLocation: Philippines, South AfricaWorking Hours: Monday-Friday, 40hrs/week. Shifts are scheduled within a 7 AM–9 PM CST window to provide coast-to-coast coverage; your specific shift is assigned on hire.Target Start Date: ASAP (Urgent Hiring)
The final offer is at the client’s discretion and will depend on the candidate’s interview result, skills, and experience.
About the Company:A mission-driven govtech company reinventing how local governments hear from, understand, and serve their residents. Our platform pairs advanced NLP and machine-learning models with community surveys and organic data, turning resident voices from social media, calls, surveys, and public engagement into clear, data-driven decisions for local governments and law enforcement agencies.
Our global team of urban enthusiasts is growing fast! If you're excited to use data and technology to solve real-world problems and measurably improve life in cities, your place is with us.
About the Role:The Customer Support Team provides ongoing support for our customers with incoming tickets, client configuration and user guidance. As a Support Specialist you will help our customers and internal teams take full advantage of our products and modules and help improve their experience in our platform.
You'll be handling both the customer-facing and the technical side as part of a distributed team that provides coast-to-coast coverage through scheduled shifts.
This is a remote role - you will need to provide your own internet connection and sufficient equipment to support our tools.
Key Responsibilities:
* Provide live support to our users across chat, email, and internal forms.
* Assist customers with engagement set ups and project configurations
* Report and track issues/bugs
* Communicate progress on issues and resolution with our users
* Escalating issues, operational tasks and feature requests to R&D
* Use our support and observability stack - Zendesk, Jira, Datadog, Databricks, Slack and Monday - to diagnose, track, and escalate issues.
Other tasks
* Support the operations that keep the platform running smoothly - such as comment
* moderation, data extraction, topic categorisation, etc.
* Maintain our internal documentation and identify knowledge gaps
* Regular data quality checks and data enrichment tasks for other teams
Qualifications:
* 1+ years of experience in a customer support role, ideally for a SaaS product
* Exceptional English: Flawless written English at a C1/C2 level and highly proficient spoken English - the role is majority written (chat, email, tickets) with government clients.
* Previous experience with support CRM (e.g: Zendesk, Hubspot)
* Customer obsessed: A genuine passion and curiosity for helping people and solving problems
* Keen attention to detail: You spot the mistakes that everyone else misses
* Tech-savvy: You are comfortable learning and using new web-based software (e.g., helpdesk tools, CRMs, databases)
* Self-Motivated: Proactive, eager to learn, and able to manage your time effectively in a remote setting
* Resilience: You are comfortable in a fast-paced dynamic environment with constant change
* Metrics-driven: Comfortable working to time-based SLAs and measurable targets.
Nice to Have:
* Technical know-how - understanding how web frontend works (e.g., HTML/CSS)
* Familiarity with the public sector / govtech is a strong advantage.
* Exposure to SQL / data querying and observability tools (Datadog, Databricks).
* Experience with Jira or similar issue-tracking and escalation workflows.
Tips for South African Applicants
Timezone Advantage
South Africa (SAST, UTC+2) overlaps well with European business hours and has a few hours of overlap with US East Coast. Mention your timezone flexibility in your application.
Salary in Context
Even without a listed salary, international remote roles typically pay 2-3x more than equivalent local positions in South Africa due to the exchange rate advantage.
Application Tips
Tailor your CV to international standards — use a clean format, highlight remote work experience, and include your English proficiency. Many SA applicants succeed by emphasising their strong work ethic and cultural adaptability.
Load Shedding Preparedness
If you're applying for a remote role, having a backup power solution (UPS, inverter, or generator) and mobile data as a backup internet connection shows employers you're prepared for South Africa's infrastructure challenges.
About Somewhere
Somewhere is a company in the Recruitment & Staffing industry that hires remote workers from South Africa. They currently have 828 open positions on Hirezar. View all Somewhere jobs →