Who is a VA?
VA or Virtual Office Assistant is usually a self-employed home-based aide who provides creative, administrative and technical support or assistance to a business organization or individual firm owner on a professional front. Virtual assistants are not hired employees but freelancers and independent contractors who excel in the task-oriented, time-sensitive and expertize-driven work.
What does a VA do?
With the multifarious finesse and sheer understanding of the business world from top to bottom held by the VAs in their domain, they juggle with almost every administrative project that comes at hand in the organization. Having a Virtual Assistant at your service, can eliminate long hours from your work- plan and can also minimize your workload to a great extent. Following functions are necessarily needed to be pulled off by virtual assistants such as –
- Call answering service – VA deals with administrative and fielding calls and thus provides various levels of customer service. Answering calls, returning e-mails, typing documents, mailing letters, taking notes and similar communication-related tasks are assigned to the assistant.
- Marketing support – Creating presentations and sales material on products, managing blogs and social media accounts, collaborating with writers, web and graphic designers and artists are also some features of an all-rounder Virtual Assistant.
- Sales support – This dimension includes finding and engaging potential customers, influencing and attracting a greater number of clients, creating promotional campaigns and events and driving traffic to online storefronts.
- Operational tasks – These services include advising the existing customers on how to follow the best practices, building new teams and recruiting other new virtual assistants and also handling scheduling and delegate daily tasks to the employees.
- Personal assistance – VA also serves as a point of contact for other team members. Booking travel accommodations and car rentals, scheduling meetings and managing daily calendar, etc. also come under the various jobs.
- IT/ Technical support service – Under this category of work, VA has to handle the updates and maintenance of the website, manage networks, servers, office hardware, etc. and provide technical support to customers and vendors.
- Professional support – Accounting and payroll- related financial tasks and sharing industry- related advice and guidance are handled by the virtual assistant. Also, making business purchases and dealing with vendors is done by the VA.
What are the must-have skill sets?
Although the job Virtual Assistants perform seems difficult after looking at the wide range of functions undertaken by them, but the requirements to qualify as quite a fine VA are pretty straightforward. Knowing which tasks to delegate can be a bit tricky though, but whether you are starting a business or growing it, there is a defined set of proficiency one needs to possess in order to do it right! Becoming a successful VA isn’t simply about helping someone with their admin, doing the excellent call answering service right or supporting their business with one single field of excellence, you need to be extraordinary. Also, it is very necessary to know how to manage people or customers effectively and this trait can only be acquired if you develop the following prowess in yourself:
- Good communication skills: Let’s just cut right to the chase on this point. This is one sure-shot quality that will take you to heights anywhere in the world. So, you definitely need to be “good enough” at making engaging communications.
- Planning and strategizing mindset: As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to get caught up in the work that’s in front of you. So, it is really necessary to organize your work and make plans to abide by, thereby reducing stress and backlogs.
- Expertise in customer service: Providing the customers with satisfactory services is one spot you cannot afford to miss at any cost. This is by far the most crucial factor to determine your whole career.
- Prioritized revenue generating tasks: To avoid letting your bottom line from suffering immeasurably, place your emphasis on tasks that generate revenue. Divide your to-do-list on the basis of work that requires your utmost and the least attention.
- Experience in consumer electronics: With the rapid advent of technology, you can’t do without being comfortable with accessing the gadgets and digital electronic devices. Therefore a VA is required to be a tech-savvy too.
- Knowledge of retail sales: The sales department has been one of the major leading sectors of any business since forever. So you need to know it all about the sales sector. Getting updated regarding latest sales methodologies and new strategies to improve and promote sales is a must.
- Strong understanding of google docs and google calendar:
Google Docs and Google Calendar are the solutions to keeping the complicated data easily accessible and modified and also the unsystematic organization of work in proper order.
How to have the perfect VA?
All the vital information about the company and the job profile specifications as much as possible in detail should be mentioned or stated to the independent contractor. Unavoidable eligibility criteria in terms of qualification, skill- sets, added knowledge and other such details must be specified beforehand so that there is no regret after allotting the role to the person because a Virtual Assistant is supposed to be in the best possible form.
