Does your company need a lifeline? Well, you are not alone. In essence, a freelance virtual assistant or remote worker saves a company a great deal of time, productivity, and money, as well as freeing up more focus time for the owner or manager to figure out the entire business. Here are the different kinds of virtual staff and their various services. We also discuss the reasons and the right time that drive companies to hire a virtual assistant.
What Drives the Need for a Remote Virtual Staff?
Remote virtual staff can perform multiple jobs, from unskilled menial tasks to highly skilled work involving creativity and resourcefulness. But if you’re a business owner or manager, often you don’t know why successful companies decide to go virtual with their staff.
1. Increase Efficiency By Outsourcing Tasks
Every business owner or manager wants growth. Who does not want it? But are you willing to conduct all the time-consuming tasks all by yourself? That’s one of the reasons you opt to find an offshore outsourcing company like Phoenix Virtual Solutions to provide alternative staffing solutions for you! Yes, they exist! Rely on healthcare virtual staff from the Philippines to take advantage of scaling up your health practice or your healthcare business faster. These virtual assistants are cost-effective, can tackle mundane tasks that take away time, and assist you in freeing up time so you can invest more time and resources needed to be done by your in-house employees. They have the exact set of skills your business needs.
2. Quickly Scale Up Your Business Operations
When the work demands increase, you worry about rushing your process in recruiting workers. Using virtual assistants and their talent is the solution. Quickly hire them on a project basis to cope with the sudden work demand. When everything has settled down, slowly hire full-time employees who have the dedication to provide all of your customers the same consistent answers to their queries.
3. Reduced Costs
Paying overhead costs can be bothersome. Hiring a virtual assistant to do small tasks instead of a full-time employee can reduce the operating costs. You don’t need to pay them for overheads, like expenses on office space and laptops, because virtual assistants work remotely and would usually have their own working computers and internet provisions. Pay them depending on the agreed salary based on an hourly or task basis. With regards to training, remote workers typically already excel at the specific work and can start working immediately, saving you on training costs. Unless you decide to hire a first-time employee, training them is quick and easy as they need not attend in person and come to work physically. You don’t have to spend money on office space and utilities either to accommodate your virtual staff.
4. Frees Up Time for Strategic Thinking
Since you’ve delegated non-core activities to your newly-hired virtual assistants, it is time to invest and think about business operations strategically to achieve success on a long-term basis. Monitor their activities with the aid of an employee monitoring app such as Time Doctor. Stop wasting time and resources in doing daily operations. You may feel overwhelmed by them and suffer from burnout. Refrain from this negative impact on your business. Set goals to guide your company to better performance while keeping it moving forward and focusing on the bigger picture. Streamline your processes by outsourcing your workload to a team of competent and highly skilled virtual staff with Phoenix Virtual Solutions. We can do it all for you!
5. Offer 24/7 Customer Service
If your business has a global scope of customers, catering to their needs in different time zones poses difficulty. The only way to deal with this is to go offshore and hire a team of remote virtual staff located in different time zones. They can attend to your customers 24/7 while maintaining a good work-life balance. Communicate flawlessly using cloud communication software like Ring Central to reach each remote worker, whether online or offline.
Various Kinds of Virtual Assistants
A virtual assistant works remotely at a home office in a remote location with various services offered to companies regardless of whether it is a large or small scale business. Virtual assistants work based on the nature of your business demands where they are able to manage a set of tasks with defined responsibilities. Keep up with how they deliver their services. There are a lot of home-based virtual assistant jobs in the Philippines. Here are the various kinds of virtual assistants according to their specializations:
Virtual Healthcare Assistant
Virtual healthcare assistants streamline daily activities for healthcare professionals, improve patient satisfaction, and reduce manual labor costs. They can handle menial and repetitive tasks, freeing up healthcare practitioners’ time to focus on more important work, and improve patient care in this digital age.
Medical practice is improved because virtual healthcare assistants‘ services enable doctors to complete activities more quickly.
Here are some of the day-to-day tasks of a virtual healthcare assistant:
- Schedule appointments
- Assists with medical billing
- Takes calls and messages, filtering urgent calls
- Manage emails by dealing with admin-related tasks such as invoices, referrals, and questions about insurance
- Helps in claims processing and assists in the patient’s completion of paperwork
- Track the patient’s record and build an online medical history to be used for future diagnosis
- Orders medical supplies, tracks and monitors purchases
- and executes other general office management tasks
Administrative Virtual Assistant
These general virtual assistants work similarly to a secretary or executive assistant but won’t be able to make your coffee because they most probably work across the globe. They can do much of the same secretarial functions for half the price. Business owners need them to keep abreast of everything while focusing on how to run their companies. The duties of this type of virtual assistant are the following:
- Answer the phone
- Handle routine issues of customer service
- Send and respond to emails
- Manage your diary and schedule
- Schedule appointments
- Maintain database
- Pay bills and
- (Optional) book hotel rooms and plane tickets
Social Media Marketing Virtual Assistant
If you don’t have time or the skills to draw up ideas for your company’s campaigns on social media, this virtual assistant can execute the following duties:
- Create and discover new content for your social media channels
- Generate social media profiles on various social media platforms
- Schedule posts with the assistance of social media tools
- Monitor your statistics
- Generate measuring analytics and performance metrics
- Boost the overall presence of your brand if luck is on your side
- Keep a vigilant eye on the competitors
- Reflect market trends in real-time
- Save on expensive promotional mistakes
Virtual Bookkeepers
If you delegate balancing books and focus on your product line improvements and getting more customers, this VA takes the following duties out of your hands:
- Handle cash flow, payroll processing, undertaking bank, and credit card reconciliation, and other financial business areas
- Manage revenue expenditure
- Budget and do the books
- Manage inventory and record-keeping processes
- Should have a background in accounting
- Offer proficiency in bookkeeping software
Research Assistant
These virtual assistants specialize in research and identify potential areas for your business growth. Their duties cover the following:
- Search online for trustworthy sites for current information and any statistics related to your business
- Connect the missing dots for your business areas
- Pilot competitive intelligence
- Prepare the resulting data in a format that is easy to read, concise, and clear
- Recognize prospects for business growth and guest blogging
- Assist with selection of the correct vendor
Customer Service Virtual Assistant
When it comes to these virtual assistants, the extra attention you typically extend to your customers is no longer a need. They manage the following duties in customer communications:
- Identify the needs of customers to achieve satisfaction
- Answer customers’ inquiries
- Fix troubleshooting issues
- Compile data from customer responses
- Research answers and solutions as needed
- Take orders, determine charges, and oversee billing
- Follow up and resolve complaints from customers
- Always go the extra mile in customer engagement
Community Manager
These virtual assistants keep track of your online community, where you accumulate followings from loyal customers and potential ones. Your community will be numerous enough to hire someone to do the following duties:
- Answer community questions
- Point people in the right direction
- Develop strategies for improving community engagements
- Kick out unruly members
- Filter inappropriate posts
Digital Marketing Assistant
If you have zero knowledge on how to rank higher on the list of search engine results, leave it to these virtual assistants to do the following duties:
- Possess ample SEO (search engine optimization) skills
- Knowledge of the digital marketing space
- Manage your website
- Manage social media accounts
- Create social media posts and other content
- Drive more traffic to your website
- Manage AdWord campaigns
- Handling email campaigns
- Identify new leads
- Strategize keyword research
Real Estate Virtual Assistant
These virtual assistants can handle the following administrative duties for their clients:
- Manage appointments and schedules
- Assist in prospecting plans, real estate, and clients
- Send initial messages to possible renters with suitable listings based on their needs
- Reply to email queries
- Strategize lead generation
- Conduct property research
- Scrap real estate data using classifieds software from various online classified ads websites
Types of Virtual Assistant Services
Each virtual assistant offers different services depending on the work you want them to tackle. The list is endless but they have one common goal – an easier life for a business owner or manager – so you can spend more time with your loved ones. Here are the key tasks assigned to a remote virtual staff:
Administrative Service
Outsourcing admin tasks makes your life as a small business owner or a busy entrepreneur easier. Keep you informed and up-to-date about the happenings in your industry. Handle spreadsheets containing all current contact lists. Make arrangements for meetings and travel plans.
Social Media Marketing Service
Notice a significant increase in your customers when marketing your industry. Promote your business online by hiring an expert on social media. These days, when companies keep up with the latest trends, their services and products become visible online, making it easier for customers to identify. Contact these experts offering their services such as ones that can deal with social media platforms linked to your business like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. They can reduce your costs from advertising payments while supporting you when broadcasting your business.
Blog Management Service
When you are into blogging you don’t have much to consider. But when it becomes a serious business, you may soon need to keep track of some parts behind the scene. Secure an editorial calendar as the blog administrator so that your customers will not have last-minute struggles just to come up with an idea to post. Handle all your writing needs, such as website content, blog posts, and newsletters. Many do invest in English speaking and writing courses. Use Grammarly to ensure the correct usage of grammar and word choice.
Customer Service
This task is crucial for solopreneurs as it consumes more time. You will have lesser time to manipulate your business, create more products, and generate facilities. Outsourcing a virtual assistant allows you more flexibility with time and tasks.
Real Estate Service
Most of these managerial tasks come from real estate professionals, who want to focus their efforts more on selling more properties. Besides doing administrative work, they can share some tasks with the sales support crew. They do lead generation, searching, and database management. You can have more attention and time to your patrons as well as the needs of your in-house employees.
Lead Generation Service
This task of making potential leads is inefficient in a sales-intensive business. Leads are useless without tactics. That’s why you hire a virtual assistant to handle, take over, and plan on how you do it and who you’ll contact.
Bookkeeping Service
These economic tasks help your business achieve cash flow. Hire a virtual staff with years of experience and is trusted by many clients. Virtual assistants lessen the burden of payroll processing of other financial areas of your business. During the application process, it is important to accept candidates who possess the right skills to accomplish accounting tasks.
Basic Website Maintenance Service
Building websites do not require expert-level skills or a programmer. However, websites will require regular maintenance fixes and upgrades. This task also includes managing your website and keeping it updated and functional to ensure a professional-looking website that allows a pleasant navigation experience for site visitors.
Product Launch Service
When your products and ideas are new in your company, introduce them to your partners, affiliates, and target customers through an online product launch. The tasks include understanding sales funnels and developing marketing ideas.
Sales Funnels Service
Sales funnels are intricate tasks to set up. Turn book worms into subscribers and convert each subscriber into purchasers who pay for services. Turn those customers who make a single purchase into recurring buyers and fans. Your client will have a lot of business once you have done these correctly.
E-Commerce Service
These tasks have been very effective for all businesses since the pandemic with imposed limitations and lockdowns. Apart from managing online transactions, create the script for your product descriptions, manage product categories and classification, and edit product photos. Handle inventory and order processing daily. Manage returns and exchange of products.
When is the Right Time to Hire a Virtual Assistant for Your Company?
Time is a valuable commodity when running a business. But the way you manage your time will determine how you strategize and keep the costs manageable without sacrificing productivity. Address the variables like costs and revenues to achieve profits. The current global market remains uncertain and volatile because of the COVID-19 pandemic situation affecting the economy, rising unemployment, and the tensions between Ukraine and Russia. It is no wonder why companies must find more ways to remain profitable.
1. Too Much Work That Does Not Need a Full-Time Employee
Hiring a full-time employee becomes impractical when tasks need only a few working hours per day or week. One example is scheduling client meetings. This small job or one-off project is better to delegate to a virtual assistant.
2. Repetitive and Non-Core Tasks
Don’t waste most of your working hours doing time-consuming tasks on a day-to-day basis. Hire a virtual assistant to do non-core tasks such as emails and answering phone calls. Let them handle these efficiently and free up more time. Focus more on essential tasks.
Final Thoughts
Do a clever change for your business. Hire a HIPAA-trained and well-skilled healthcare virtual staff with Phoenix Virtual Solutions. Using their potential will contribute to your business growth. Virtual staffing solutions are a game-changer for your businesses, not exclusive to large businesses but also small entrepreneurs.
Remember, it is best to accept that every business task is not easy to handle by yourself. Your business will start to move forward when you let your in-house employees and virtual staff do what they are best at using their talents and skills.
Let Phoenix Virtual Solutions’ offshore outsourcing team handle your workload. Stay connected with us by contacting our team to know more about our roster of online services and create exciting strategies for your business.
