Virtual assistants could be a variety of administrative assistant who supports their clients while working outside of their client’s office. Internet access is an important tool for the best virtual assistant as they interact with their clients and perform most of their tasks through online platforms and shared digital documents. Virtual assistants will be full-time employees, but a majority work as independent contractors and have interaction with clients through hourly or retainer contracts. They control their own schedules, don’t receive employee benefits, and work remotely.
Are virtual assistants in demand?
Yes. In fact, virtual assistants are now one of the fastest-growing jobs categories in the United States and other countries.
Virtual Assistants (VAs) offer companies and entrepreneurs a number of benefits including lower labor costs than hiring full-time staff members, higher productivity levels, faster responses times to requests for information, better customer service ratings from clients when VA’s answer their questions about products and services instead of fallible receptionists and IT departments.
Also with more VAs available because they can’t be demonetized by a lack of skilled labor on the ground or negotiations with unions like with “regular” workers in physical offices there is less concern over future increases in wages.
What exactly does a virtual assistant do?
A good virtual assistant will manage emails for you, from planning your days and taking notes on email conversations to managing relationships with all of your contacts. That includes handling all of the nitty-gritty details like finding contacts’ phone numbers, setting up reminders about upcoming meetings, keeping track of who needs to be cc’d on an email chain. A virtual assistant can also book flights and manage other logistics.
Tips to Find an Excellent Virtual Assistant in India
There are several ways that can be very effective in finding outsourcing virtual assistant services. Let us discuss Top 7 of these tips below:
Establish your workflow early.
Discuss your potential task list along with your VA. Hopefully, you already did this during the vetting and hiring phase, but it helps to travel through the list again together with your VA after you’ve hired them. If you’re hiring a firm, the VA assigned to you’ll not be the identical person you talked to while interviewing the firm. By giving your VA an inspiration of the work coming down the pipe, they will better brace themselves for it. When you’re managing a firm, which may mean getting sub-VAs that specialize in the tasks on your list.
Try different tasks within the starting to gauge your VA’s strengths and weaknesses.
When you first start working together with your VA, do not be afraid to do different tasks. you will find that your VA can accomplish quite what you hoped for. If that is the case, you will assign this VA higher-level tasks that need some thinking and value more highly to hire a lower-cost VA to try and do the info entry work.
Give very detailed instructions.
When writing instructions, assume nothing and be as specific as possible. a minimum of until you recognize your affordable virtual assistant’s ability to “read between the lines” and/or “anticipate your needs,” ensure your instructions contain step-by-step explanations. don’t assume that your VA is ready to infer anything. They work on many varieties of tasks across all industries, so unless you hired a specialized VA, don’t assume they will fill in even the littlest holes in your instructions.
Communicate using suitable tools.
Best virtual assistant companies are going to be ready to use your preferred communications medium, whether it’s voice calls, instant messaging, video conference, email, or homing pigeon.
Keep in mind that speaking is about 7 times faster than writing, and about 4 times faster than typing. So once you’ve got an honest workflow going along with your VA, and you’re confident they understand your needs so you’ll be able to have less detailed instructions, try and integrate faster communication methods into your workflow. However, for extended project-like tasks, written instructions are better so your VA can reference them.
Once you assign the task, ask the VA to verify that they understand the task.
What you are looking for is verification that your VA understands the goals of the task and your instructions for accomplishing it. By posing for this verification up-front, it lessens the prospect your VA will waste the time you’ve purchased doing the incorrect thing.
Sign up on the task about 10-20% of the way in.
If you expect a task to require 10 hours, ask the Indian virtual assistant to come back ack after 1-2 hours with their progress. this may allow you to:
- check their work to create sure their interpretation of the task jives along with your expectations,
- update instructions to streamline the task, or
- cancel the task if it seems to be a nasty idea.
Allocate more tasks.
If you’ll do the task in an hour, expect the best virtual assistant company to require 2-3 hours.
In the beginning, after you guys are just getting accustomed to one another, it’d take 3-4 hours. Once you’ve gotten into a decent working relationship, and have found the proper assistant for the set of tasks you tend to assign, it’s going to only take 1-2 hours.
How much do you pay a virtual assistant?
In general, virtual assistants are paid anywhere from $4.00-$20.00 an hour and the cost is determined by their skillset, location, and experience level. Depending on the size of your project scope and requirements you may need to hire more than one VA. Each VA must be paid hourly but gone over before work begins to ensure they know exactly what is expected of them for the position.
While it can vary greatly depending on a number of factors discussed above, a good starting point for pricing would be $8-16 per hour (depending on experience). This way you are making sure they’re getting paid enough; but also that you’re not wasting money paying them too much.
Thus, From all the information above it can be easily derived that getting a job done through a virtual assistant can be very much beneficial for any business and can also help in the development of outsourcing environment amongst the corporate level.
