Why do business owners need a Virtual Assistant?

By: Cristina dela Cruz

What is a Virtual Assistant?

As a business owner, you can be overwhelmed by loads of paperwork and constant demands and inquiries from customers / potential customers, no matter how organized and efficient you are. In this digital era, people are now drawn to go online to shop or look for services. The best way to reach your target customers is to do online marketing and let people know about the product or service that you offer.

These are just a few things that you need to do in order to keep up with the fast pace and growing competition among other business owners. These, can be overwhelming for you and that's where the Virtual Assistant comes in to assist you with these tasks. Allow me to discuss further the advantages and benefits of having a Virtual Assistant.

Before that, please see the following link for you to have a better understanding on What is a Virtual Assistant and what are the tasks that they do to help you with your business.

You may also watch this video from Surge Marketplace discussing what is a Virtual Assistant.

So now that you got an idea of what is a Freelance Virtual assistant, let me tackle some of the benefits of having a Remote assistant.

There are times when you’ll need all the assistance that you can get, but there will also be times when you’ll have little going on. For example, with a regular employee, you will need to pay his full week's wage regardless if they they work the whole 40 hours or not.

Realistically, their service will be needed for like half of this time. That’s where virtual assistants come in – you only pay for the work done. You have the option to hire when you need some work and set the specific hours they will work per day or week to accomplish the tasks. You can always quantify the output per hour using time-tracking software or just by seeing the number of hours worked vs. the work done.

When you run a business with a physical office, you have to pay for a lot of things in addition to the service you’re getting. This includes but not limited to office rental fees, furniture, workspace, office equipment, electricity and water bills, and other charges.

However, when you hire a personal virtual assistant services, you don’t have to cover these expenses. You also do not need to provide virtual assistants with health care, paid vacation leaves, and other benefits as you would to an in-house team. Thus, you save more money for not using resources stated above.

There are businesses that require you to receive high volume of calls and emails or do some data entry. As such, this should be assigned to someone else as part of your efforts to provide good customer service.

Answering a call or replying to an email for inquiries or customer concerns will consume much of your time. With this, you can save time by assigning these administrative tasks to a virtual assistant while concentrating on more important matters such as sales or networking.

Hiring in-house staff for your business often presents a lot of challenges. You will have to hire, train, fire, and rehire until you find the right person suitable for the job.

In the end, you waste a lot of time and resources, which is not economically healthy for your business. Hiring a virtual assistant is the best option. Most virtual assistants are already trained and skilled to their craft. All you need to do is give them clear instructions, what output is expected and the task will be handled and executed .

As an entrepreneur, there may be areas of your business where you feel that is quite challenging to handle. This could be anything from project management, keeping inventory to executing ideas.

Since virtual assistants have a wide range of expertise and skills, they can offer valuable input to improve your products / services. This could be from suggesting how to improve customer service experience, new technologies for better inventory management, new ideas in email handling, marketing and management plans and other things. Remote assistant can be of value when it comes to key competency that you may be lacking in your business.

Some businesses require to handle customer inquiries and concerns 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A good example is an online shop or e-commerce business.

Having such business can be challenging, especially if you don’t have someone that works overnight to keep the business line open to attend to your customers. You can save yourself from all the hassle by hiring someone in a time zone that is different from yours. This ensures your business or service is available round the clock, whether you’re there or not.

Now that you know some of the reasons why you need a virtual assistant, you may be wondering where can you hire one that best suits your needs as a business owner.

If you are searching for a Virtual Assistant, you may contact Dela Cruz Digital Solutions for inquiries.

You may follow this link for my portfolios / sample works:

https://cristinadelacruzva.wixsite.com/dc-digital-solutions/portfolio

Credits to: Surge Marketplace / Surge Digital Agency