In addition to providing customer support, making travel arrangements, sending out client correspondence, and addressing business documents as well as accounts, your virtual assistant can also handle many small daily business tasks as well. So you have to ask yourself, are you spending too much time on administrative tasks such as updating your calendar, contacts list, and replying to repetitive emails? Why not hand these tasks over to your VA? Your VA can probably complete these tasks in less time, which means you’ll be able to focus on the bigger picture – actually growing your business.
Writing Tasks
Instead of writing your weekly or monthly newsletter, why not let your VA do it for you? Here you’d provide your VA with a list of mentionables such as your recent activities/experiences, special product offers, or new information with respect to interviews or other engagements. Your virtual assistant can write short blurbs that contain this information to create the newsletter, then put it as a draft in an online business system like Business Catalyst, ready for you to send to your audience upon your review.
Your VA can also manage your social media presence by posting informational comments, quotes, links to published articles about yourself or your business, and other information your followers want to see. Your VA can also respond to questions and comments left by clients and customers, which is an outstanding way of ensuring that your customers always receive answers to their questions without undue delays.
Depending on your VA’s skills set, other writing tasks you can assign include website content, training materials, crafting FAQs, and email correspondence, especially in the form of customer/client support.
Customer Service
To help maintain solid business relationships with past and present customers and clients, ask your VA to send a quick, personalized ‘How are You?’ email to the people on your contacts list. You could even have your VA send this type of email on a quarterly basis to stay in contact with clients, ongoing.
Additionally, your VA can also send follow-up emails to customers after they purchase your goods or services, or send emails asking for testimonials or to request referrals. Then, ask your VA to forward all replies to you, so you can review them personally, prioritize accordingly and arrange opportune meetings to speak with clients directly.
Market Research
Internet research can be a very time-consuming and tedious endeavor, so rather than spending your own time during the day researching potential clients or your competition, give this task to your VA with a set of instructions so they know what to look for.
Virtual assistants with online research, spreadsheet creation, and data entry experience should be able to compile a comprehensive list of what you’re looking for relatively quickly.
Customer / Client Databases
Instead of spending an afternoon entering in business card information or conducting online research for customer or client contact information, ask your VA to maintain an updated version of your contacts list. This way, you can spend more time attracting new customers and clients with the aim of incorporating them into your business.
As you can see from the above, your virtual assistant is an invaluable resource that you can use to keep your business running smoothly, which is precisely why you’ll want to check in with them often to make sure they have the proper instructions and information to complete tasks on time. And finally, you’ll want to provide adequate feedback on a regular basis to ensure that all tasks are completed correctly and to your satisfaction, without fail.
As time goes on, especially as your business relationship progresses, you’ll see that your VA will require less and less instruction from you, eventually becoming a highly adaptive and extremely efficient facet of your business operations – a valuable asset indeed.
