What is a virtual office assistant and how they can help you?
Virtual assistants are increasing in popularity and demand in today’s digital business world. Helping you handle your tasks from a remote location, a virtual office assistant might be just what you need without incurring as much costs as having a full time employee.
What is a virtual office assistant?
Unlike an assistant that comes into your office every day, a virtual assistant works remotely and takes on tasks as an independent contractor. Skill levels range in this profession, but typically, virtual assistants come from backgrounds of office management, administrative services, or secretarial work.
How They Can Help
While a virtual assistant can’t do coffee runs for you, there are still many important tasks that they can help you with.
Scheduling
Much like a regular assistant, virtual assistants are fantastic when it comes to scheduling. Whether it is keeping track of appointments, setting meetings, or managing your calendar, they can help you better manage your time. Because of their remote work, virtual assistants don’t typically need to follow the standard 9-5 day. This means that it is more likely that your assistant will be available for more hours and there when you need to check your schedule.
Assistance
As the name would suggest, virtual assistants provide assistance for a variety of tasks. You should always ask a potential hire what their skills and experience history is to find out where their strengths and weaknesses are. But for most businesses, you end up with someone who knows more than the basics of secretarial work. This can include assisting in data entry, research, project management, data collection, or even customer support.
Support
Virtual assistants can also function as customer support by handling emails, live chats and taking phone calls from customers with questions. If you don’t typically see a lot of phone traffic, you may not need to look for further help with customer support beyond your virtual assistant.
Creating Content
Depending on the skill set of your virtual assistant, you might also be able to look to them for content creation. This can include things like writing, translating, editing text or pictures, and even graphic design. It might also be possible to have them proofread and edit other people’s work to keep everything simple.
Online Presence
It is important for any business in this day and age to have an online presence of some kind. A virtual assistant can greatly increase your online presence and help you to get the word out about your business. For example, blogs are a fantastic way to create content about your business that can better inform potential clients what to expect with you. Posts on social media sites like Twitter and Instagram are also simple, yet important ways to keep your brand in people’s minds without being overly pushy. Having a virtual assistant managing your online presence and creating content is extremely beneficial.
Conclusion
It can be stressful enough running a physical business and you might not require the service of a full time employee right now. Avoid trying to do it all yourself and let a virtual assistant help you keep your business running smoothly.
