Owning and running a small business usually means wearing many hats and juggling numerous responsibilities. A small business owner may find themselves emailing, meeting scheduling, meeting attending, customer service, data entry, researching, following up, and/or invoicing.
A business's increased reliance on digital tools to operate means that virtual assistants can help with a lot of the administrative and business tasks.
Not all virtual assistants are created equally. What a business needs and the tasks a virtual assistant helps with varies. For example, a business may need virtual assistant help with administration and/or customer service. On the other hand, a business may need virtual assistant help with research, e-commerce tasks, digital marketing, content creation, and/or lead generation and follow-up.
What is a virtual assistant?
A virtual assistant (VA) is an independent contractor who provides a variety of support for a business from a remote location.
Because a VA works remotely, support can be organized based on actual requirements rather than creating a traditional in-office role for every task.
Why are businesses using virtual assistants?
There are many reasons, but time is one of the biggest. Virtual assistants free up time to allow a small business owner to concentrate on the many other requirements of running a business.
An entrepreneurs time is precious. Many entrepreneurs spend a large part of their day doing numerous tasks that while necessary, do not always require their direct participation. When these tasks accumulate, it leaves less time to do a variety of crucial tasks like planning, working on the improvement of products and services, and communicating with important clients and customers.
One way to create a better delineation of tasks is to hire a virtual assistant. Often, the line between the owner and the employee is blurred and the owner of the business may make many of the important decisions, while the virtual assistant does tasks such as managing the schedule, email management, customer follow up, data entry, research and other tasks that free up the time of the business owner.
A virtual assistant can perform many tasks depending on the needs of a particular business. A virtual assistant can perform customer support, research and data entry, appointment scheduling, lead and customer follow ups, and a myriad of other tasks.
One of the most important factors of assigning tasks to a virtual assistant is defining the tasks clearly beforehand.
Virtual support is most helpful in the area of customer support. Often the same people who communicate with customers are the ones responsible for sales, operations and management. This results in a failure to communicate in a timely and consistent manner. A virtual assistant can help organize customer queries, respond to frequently asked questions, and perform a follow up on important customer requests.
This could support (not replace) customer service departments, or assist businesses in the interim while they hire employees to form internal teams.
This could allow business owners to focus on product/service offerings, customer experiences, and their business plans.
An e-commerce business can have many small tasks that require attention. Some examples are the following:
Answering customer questions.
Following up on orders.
Organizing product information.
Virtual assistants can help with these tasks, giving business owners the time to focus on other areas of their business, such as the product/service offerings, customer experience, and planning for the business.
This can be especially true for businesses that use the virtual assistant to assist them with online marketing work.
There are many repetitive tasks in online marketing, such as the following:
Researching content ideas.
Organizing data.
Scheduling social media posts.
Responding to customer messages.
Lead generation.
These support activities can take a lot of time. While a virtual assistant helps to free up time for repetitive tasks, employees can focus on strategy, creative work, and overall campaign direction.
Because a small business often has a small team where one person wears many hats, this division of labor can be beneficial for a small business.
Decide which tasks can be delegated.
Document the basic workflow for those tasks.
Define how you communicate and report.
Regularly review your work.
This process makes it easier to determine if virtual support is helpful.
Virtual assistant vs. automation
In many situations, a virtual assistant and automation can be used together.
For a task that can be fully automated, a business might still find it useful to have a virtual assistant to provide support for other, more unpredictable, processes that require human judgment or communication.
Often, a business can use both approaches at the same time. Automation can be used for fully predictable processes, and a virtual assistant can be used for unpredictable processes that require human attention.
Importance of Communication
Remote work increases the need for clear communication.
A business needs to create a system to determine how work will be assigned and accepted, where information will be shared, stored, or reported, how work progress will be communicated, and how to handle or prioritize unexpected issues.
Simple documentation can be transformational. The use of shared task lists, clear directives, assigned deadlines, and timely communication can dramatically reduce the number of mistakes made by employees.
The objective is not to add unnecessary management work. The goal is to document work processes in ways that clearly articulate what is expected of employees and management.
Final Thoughts
Virtual assistants can be an efficient solution for businesses that have a growing workload and need support beyond their existing employees.
This can be implemented for tasks from admin work, customer support, research, order fulfillment, e-commerce, and digital marketing.
It is best to begin by analyzing the existing workload of the business, and identifying work processes that are repetitive, time consuming, and support remote work.
The continuous digital evolution of business will make remote work a major component of how small work teams organize their daily work.
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