A professional, or several professionals specialized in the organization and administration of support tasks can help agilize various processes and optimize the remote active management of clients. For example, think of the virtual assistant figure who can give you a hand in strengthening your client relationships, organize your schedule, and even negotiate with providers.
2020 has been a crazy year, and it’s served as a clear reminder that the phrase “adapt or die” is more applicable than ever. Without delving into the rising social, political, and economic phenomena that we’re all aware of, companies are seriously reconsidering the paths they’re taking to survive in the market, meaning that the beginning of 2021 will be marked by bold, innovative, and above all, extremely competitive business strategies.
If you’re a leader in a company in the digital, technology, or communications sector, it’s time to get ready because the year is almost at an end. Crucial dates for promotions, events, and holidays are coming up. Your prospective clients are constantly bombarded by ads and promotions from the competition, and there’s little room for error. Even a minor mistake can cost your company clients. But it’s not just about navigating obstacles to keeping your company afloat; it’s also about finding a way to make the most of this stage and grow stronger.
Hiring a permanent or a temporary support team is one of the best things you can do to finish the year strong and start the new year with a competitive advantage. Keep reading to find out what this means and how you can benefit from this system.
Three keys to ending the year on a high note
On one hand, it’s important to protect your company’s positive image. On the other hand, it’s important to boost your growth with more efficient and aggressive strategies.
So what does that mean? In a nutshell it means:
- Increasing your sales (making the most of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, end of the year holidays, and seasonal promotions)
- Taking care of your current clients (Keeping in touch with them on the dates above, proposing repeat business strategies, and continuing to provide the best service possible)
- Scaling your business by implementing new services, strategies and products
Your current team’s agility, creativity, and innovation to achieve all of this are absolutely fantastic, but they’re probably encountering some sort of obstacle due to the number of administrative tasks that they have to complete. Even though these tasks have to get done, they aren’t necessarily helping your company provide the best value proposition.
Why not delegate and let a support professional broaden the scope of your experience?
What does a support professional do?
Support professional provide remote counsel and assistance to a company. Generally they support businesses that don’t need in person or full-time employees, especially on specific tasks or high season.
A freelance assistant specializes in agilizing different processes and optimizing active client management. This remote assistance model is so efficient and provides such great results that according to data published by Telegraph, it’s become one of the fastest-growing freelance categories over the past few years.
Many may think that a virtual assistant is a secretary whose role is limited to organizing schedules, taking messages, and making reservations, but the truth is that virtual assistants can be partners who can do practically anything you need, from dealing with angry clients to calculating your taxes for you.
Here are just a few advantages of growing your business with an on-demand talent team:
- You can save up to 40% in structure costs.
- You have access to a wide range of professionals with the skills and specializations you’re looking for.
- You can hire on an hourly, project, permanent, or temporary basis according to your plans and needs.
- On-demand talent can speed up the rest of your team’s results as well as implement strategies that will help you grow more.
Here just a few areas that virtual assistants specialize in:
Research
Research virtual assistants specialize in researching, analyzing, and synthesizing information for you. This includes everything from market research to in-depth research of your competition. Other roles include SEO and creating new strategies to improve your positioning, comparing products and providers to help you make the best decision, financial forecasting, and more.
Basically, you can ask a virtual assistant specialized in research any complex question, and they’ll quickly provide you with a guaranteed, practical, and useful answer.
Administration
Everything that an administrative assistant does in person can be done virtually: creating agendas, scheduling meetings, making reservations, filtering and responding to emails, etc
But there are plenty of other simple tasks that don’t necessarily involve a high level of specialization associated with finances, accounting, and even community managing that can be delegated to these professionals. In other words, with simple training, you can ensure that these assistants will do their work perfectly without needing to hire a consulting and design strategy specialist.
Customer Support
Whether it’s to answer questions or handle complaints, your customer service has to be 100% optimized, especially during the high season. Every client that has a less than ideal experience is likely to go to the competition or leave a bad review, or both.
On the other hand, your staffing needs will vary from the high season to the low season. The solution is to hire a support team when you need it.
A virtual assistant specialized in customer support has a wide range of experience answering questions and working on different channels, from the traditional phone calls to live chats on your website and responding to comments on social media. They can also solve simple problems and only redirect questions to higher levels of service only when it’s really necessary, that way your company prevents the typical frustration of waiting for hours to get customer service.
Specialized Activities
A lot of times, what you need is an expert to help you establish a strategy who provides you with consulting or supports you throughout a specific project. Freelancers specialized in programming, content creation, design, e-commerce, agile methodology, app development, data analysis, CRM and automation, finances, and more, can help you scale sustainably, search for new markets, automate processes, and diversify what your company offers.
If you want great ideas linked to the opportunities that each of these profiles offer you, don’t miss our SME Guide to reviving and boosting their business with the help of freelancers.
How can you integrate and organize a team of virtual assistants into your company?
1.- Define your short and medium term needs
We’ve already established the three keys to ending your year on a high note: taking care of your clients, increasing your sales, and scaling your business model.
It may be that your team has all the skills necessary to achieve this, but they’re wasting time on daily activities that a virtual assistant can do, such as filtering customer services messages or cold-calling clients. It may also be that you need an expert’s guidance for a specific project like creating a more efficient digital strategy or rolling out an e-commerce. A specialized freelancer can help in these cases.
Whatever the case may be, define your general objectives first and figure out where you need reinforcement.
2.- Identify where you need support and specialized talent
Communication with your work team is key. Ask them if they’re taking the time to explore their growth potential and also what types of skills, tools, or strategies they need to learn. For example, maybe they’ll tell you that your customer service methodology is inefficient and triangulates information; in that case, you can hire a freelancer just to develop a more effective solution to communicate with clients and train your service team to use these solutions correctly.
Don’t forget to involve your current team with the changes that you’re implementing in order to avoid miscommunications about the new remote components. When you include your current team in these processes, they’ll facilitate the process and help the assistants do a better job.
3.- Structure the project
Now that you’ve established where you need support, think about which skills are necessary to complete these tasks with a high level of quality, and tailor your project to attract specialists in the areas you need in order to make your project a success.
Just as you defined your general objectives in the beginning, it’s important to define specific goals that have to do with time-sensitive tasks that each of your virtual assistants or freelancers will take care of. Remember, you’ll have to explain the task step by step and establish the ultimate objective of the support your freelancer is providing in order to find the perfect partner. By doing this, your partner will feel like a part of the team and committed to doing their best.
For example, if you’re looking for a virtual sales assistant, your activities should include cold-calling because the ultimate objective of their work is to pass warm leads onto your account executives to initiate the decision making process and avoid “wasting” their talent and gift of gab with prospects that aren’t ready.
4.- Assemble your dream team
With a clearly defined and well structured project, it’ll be a lot easier to find the talent that you’re looking for. Whether you’re hiring just one virtual assistant or a full team for one or more areas, it’s important to match the best possible profile with the tasks that need to get done, but remember that there are plenty of administrative activities that really don’t need a specialist and can be done effectively at a very reasonable price.
Above all, make sure you only hire by the number of hours that you need per day or week.
5.- Don’t forget onboarding!
Onboarding refers to the process of speeding up the learning curve and familiarizing staff and clients with new components. In order for a virtual assistant specialized in any area to provide you with the greatest return on investment, it’s imperative that you take the time to design a welcome process that helps them clearly understand their responsibilities, your expectations of them, how they can get help, and how they can properly integrate themselves into your company culture.
A proper onboarding strategy is an investment that saves you time in the short, medium, and long term because it prevents mistakes and issues that end up slowing down everyone’s work.
Workana B2B : A new digital talent recruiting strategy
There are clear advantages to hiring a team of virtual assistants. However, we know that your time is precious. If you’re concerned about the logistics of implementing this hybrid work model, we have great news! Workana B2B offers all of the consulting and guidance that you need to quickly create and launch your remote talent recruitment strategy, guaranteed.
Our experts will take care of helping you identify your needs and what kind of profiles and hiring models best meet your needs. Our platform is designed for you to administer and manage work and payment in a secure, transparent, and reliable manner.
All you need to do is get in touch with the Workana Enterprise team and schedule an interview free of charge and commitment-free. A few of the companies that are already scaling with our virtual support teams are Uber, Unilever, and Ambev.
Schedule your consultation today and start 2021 with a competitive edge!
