Monday, March 3, 2014

Humanatic Review

Humanatic

 NATURE OF WORK AND PAYMENT

On Humanatic, you review calls to customer service departments - mostly a car dealership from what I've seen so far - and evaluate them for a variety of things. For example, one of the most common is to review the call to see if the customer was eventually connected to the department or person that they requested. The calls are pre-recorded and you simply listen to an audio file and answer questions about them online; there's no telephone interaction on your part.

Payment is fairly low - it's determined by length of call and ranges from about 1 to 5 cents per call reviewed. You're free to do as many or few calls as you care to. The payout threshold is $10.

 SITE HISTORY / LEGITIMACY

Humanatic is owned and operated by Century Interactive. They've been in business since 1988, presumably with a non-crowdsourced business model until recently. There's a handful of complaints about accounts being locked out just prior to reaching the payment threshold on various blogs and forums, but that's pretty standard for any work-at-home site.

There's no glaring evidence at this point that you won't get your money, and they've been operating for a few years now.

INTERNATIONAL ACCESS

Humanatic is based in the US but doesn't seem to specify one way or the other whether you have to be a US citizen to work for them. The only potential obstacle is that the only payment option is by Paypal. Well, that, and you need a fluent command of English to do this job as it's entirely about listening to calls made to United States businesses - you can't fake your way through it with Google Translate and guessing.

STARTING OUT

At this time Humanatic has a waiting list. You have to fill out a brief application (no heavy personal information) and wait to be contacted. I filled mine out in September and was approved for an account in mid-December. Call screening is first-come first-served with whatever's available, with payment dependent on whatever that particular group's complexity of questions is and how long the calls tend to be. This can vary widely day to day and you can never be sure what's going to be available (if anything).

My experience has been call groups that pay only around 1 cent per call are the only ones commonly seen.




PROBLEMS WITH HUMANATIC

The chief problem is just that it pays so little for the time it consumes. Granted, it's a very easy task - even easier than most stuff on Mechanical Turk - but it still takes at least a minute or so per call. Even with the higher-paying calls, at that rate you're still making less than a dollar per hour most of the time.

The other is that the payment system is not totally transparent and you don't always get the full payment per call, but I still don't understand the reasoning behind it. All I know is that I started with a batch that was 2 cents per call, worked for about 25 minutes with no problems, and wound up with only 7 cents pay to show for it in the end.

FINAL VERDICT - NOT WORTH IT

An already non-generous pay scheme gets even worse with flaky rules. My understanding is that most people who do Humanatic pair it with something like Mechanical Turk simultaneously, but that doesn't work well if you're writing (at least if you're not writing total crap - you need to concentrate fully on what you're doing to write worth a damn). The pay is just way too marginal even for how easy the tasks are.

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