Virtual Assistants (or VA's) are people who accomplish task on your behalf without being physically nearby.
Virtual Assistants (or “VA’s”) are real people who accomplish tasks on your behalf without needing to be physically nearby. They tend to be cost effective for a number of reasons, from having multiple individuals share a single virtual assistant to the lower prevailing wages at the VA’s locality. VA’s may be based in another state or in another country, enabled by technologies that allow collaboration across multiple locations.
Virtual Assistants have been known to take your calls and organize your calendar, book your flight or call a taxi for you.
They may also be assigned to do administrative tasks like invoicing, billing or message handling. VA’s may be “tasked-based”, that is, they are measured and paid according to the tasks they accomplish; or “time-based”, which requires them to accomplish a number of tasks within a pre-defined time period. Virtual Assistants can be more specialized for some industries, like Sales & Marketing, Real Estate and many more.
For small businesses, virtual assistants are associated with cost savings. For example, they can handle mundane tasks like calling customer service with a 45-minute hold time. They also help make administration much simpler from the point of view of HR and IT management.
However, virtual assistants have a greater potential of impacting your business beyond basic cost management. VA’s, being more autonomous and carrying near zero footprint in terms of space and computing, add a new dimension to the dynamics of your operations. Here are a few benefits of having virtual assistants:
Virtual Assistance service is scalable and flexible. This allows you to grow quickly or shrink as quickly depending on your business growth or seasonality.
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Virtual Assistance service is scalable and flexible. This allows you to grow quickly or shrink as quickly depending on your business growth or seasonality. They took in a virtual assistant for a three-month period to manage risks. Another facility had their virtual assistant start work at 6am on Mondays to clear the faxes and make Monday mornings a little more organized for the staff. Virtual Assistants quite likely are operating from a different time zone and can be flexible. Sometimes, all it takes is a phone call to add or change schedules.
Virtual Assistants can give you time to spend growing your business. A real estate broker spends many hours every day filling up forms, maintaining MLS postings and database research. She has great ideas to reach out to new buyers to take advantage of a short summer peak in an exemplary school district. But between the paperwork, the research and her desire to answer to all incoming phone calls, she never had time to really design that new mailer and update her mailing list. A virtual assistant handled the administrative work and gave her an extra three hours a day to successfully close a few more deals.
Virtual Assistants can give your people more time for provide superior customer service. A medical clinic took in Virtual Medical Assistants to process the 100+ daily fax messages they receive, as well as verify and pre-certify insurance. As a result, its regular staff could take most patient calls, dramatically shorten response time for prescription refill requests as well as a calls for advising laboratory results.