We all know that a well-trained VA will increase our profits. Mostly by doing the menial tasks that you and/or your other on-site staff wastes time doing, instead of more important jobs like getting more customers, developing more products, improving your marketing situation, etc.
There are some roles that a Virtual Assistant fills that often go underrated or underused by the delegators who use them. And if you’re a business owner who’s currently on the fence about whether to hire one or not, you might be surprised at just what they can do for you.
24/7 Virtual Assistant, one of the leading personal assistant companies, shares four of many ways Virtual Assistants can offer to your business:
1. Customer/Client Management
In order to provide excellent frontline customer service, a business owner and their staff has to be good a juggling. Service clients want constant updates about progress, they want to be able contact you at every hour of the day, regardless of timezone restrictions, etc. People who by your tangible products want to ask pre-sales questions and call you every 48 hours to see where in the world the package they just ordered is.
Then there’s aftersales support, which can really but the brakes on your new customer acquisition and other marketing efforts. A competent VA can handle all or at least most of your customer service duties, leaving you and/or your higher-paid office staff to focus on innovation and acquisition, reporting to you only when something comes up that they can’t handle.
2. Screening and Streamlining Communication
Ever spent more than an hour sorting the junk email from the important stuff? How about checking your phone every 5 minutes from dawn to dusk to avoid missing important phone calls from clients, suppliers, logistics companies, etc.?
More important, if you have: why? Having to sort the important from the non-essential communication is a huge productivity killer that can severely limit your business’s progress. VA’s can sort everything according to urgency, put it all in an easy to-do list and allow you to get to the important emails in your inbox and only call back the clients and contacts that need your attention right away.
3. Increasing Your Online Presence
It’s hard to maintain a daily blog, or keep your social media channels well fed with interesting, authority building content. Research is required to find out what information people are looking for, then there’s the writing, posting, sharing, etc. Each of these steps can take hours of time that a busy professional simply does not have.
A Virtual Assistant can take care of one or all of the daily online brand-building tasks that your business needs to do build and maintain a profitable online presence. All that will be required, in some cases is the need for you or another trusted staff member to monitor what’s going out on the web, to ensure the content’s inline with your company values.
4. Product/Service and Market Research
The biggest time-consuming aspect of research is determining what’s most relevant to you. The Internet is a great resource that allows you stay away from the libraries and bookstores. However, sorting through endless sites full of data can make expanding a product line, searching for and monitoring trends, or looking into a new industry an impossibly long process.
You’ll find that above all else, most VA’s will be immaculate researchers, able to sift through various sources and put only the most relevant in front of you.
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