Running a business is not a cakewalk. A new business comes with a lot of tasks and responsibilities. As the trends are ever-changing, the trend of contactless support is ever fresh, however it comes with a lot of challenges and exciting opportunities for entrepreneurs and small business owners.
As the business grows, the growing business may require greater efforts to help support this growth. Virtual assistance is the most popular tool amongst freelancers, entrepreneurs, and large business owners mainly because they can help in so many different ways.
Managing a team of virtual assistants can be challenging. The mode of communication is only the internet and there is a lack of face-to-face interactions that make it harder to communicate ideas and share knowledge with the rest of your members. Here comes the role of knowledge management software, which is very effective in remote working situations.
What Is A Virtual Assistant?
A Virtual Assistant is an administrative assistant which is helpful in various professional functions to support a company remotely. Talking about freelancers and Personal Assistants, the demand for virtual goods increases, and small businesses understand the value of flexibility and cost-effectiveness of their services.
However, nowadays the internet has easy access and e-mail has opened new alternate possibilities for many independent professionals to work remotely from their home office while providing the same value to the company they work for.
Why Hire A Virtual Assistant For Your Business?
We have understood what a virtual assistant is, which lets us understand why a business should hire a Virtual Assistant.
Let’s discuss the top five reasons to hire a virtual assistant below:
1.Reduction in cost: There are business owners and entrepreneurs who hire virtual assistants. Here are various ways Virtual assistants can help your business.
Lower Salaries And Operating Costs: A virtual assistant can be hired instead of hiring a full-time employee to do a menial job. The only reason behind that is that the owner needs to pay on an hourly basis or the task-based payment. In hiring a virtual assistant payment is done on a task basis. In addition to that, if they are working remotely, you don’t need to pay for the overhead charges like for their internet connection, laptop, or other office space-related expenses.
Lower Training Costs: Virtual assistant means hiring professionals saves the training cost. Thinking about how they can reduce the cost, let us understand that when you hire a first-time employee, you’ll have to invest a considerable amount of time and resources into training them for different aspects of their job. However, as virtual assistants have complete excel on the specific tasks and you won’t have to worry about training them. They can get started right away!
2. Efficiency to be increased by Outsourcing Non-Core Tasks: Hiring a virtual assistant has various advantages, another advantage is that businesses focus on their core competencies. Here’s how Companies and entrepreneurs deal with tons of non-core activities like:
- Sending emails and newsletters
- Handling customer queries
- Internet research
- Scheduling meetings
- Data entry
While these are necessary tasks, they’re all not core tasks that need to be done by an in-house team. Forcing your in-house employees to do these all the tasks takes away time they could be spending on things that need to be done in person.
By outsourcing your non-core activities to a virtual assistant with the right skill set, you don’t have to worry about managing these activities in-house. The major advantage of this is that it lets you invest your time and resources into tasks that need to be done by your in-office team.
3. Scale your business operations quickly: Virtual assistance helps your business operations to grow quickly. Virtual assistance has the ability to quickly hire talent on a project-by-project basis. this will help you to cope up easily with increasing work demands without worrying about rushing your recruitment process.
You can use virtual assistants to quickly deal with sudden scope increases and then slowly hire full-time employees once things have settled down. Productivity increases by hiring a virtual assistant and this ensures your customer receives a timely response. In case your employee is busy with some other project, a virtual assistant can take your place and respond to the queries. Hence, the more the work is done in a productive way, the more the scale of your business increases.
4. Offer 24/7 Customer Service: Most businesses have customers spread across the globe. But when your business and staff are only located in one area, coping with global needs and international time zones can be difficult.
For example, if you’re based in New York, your operating hours will be midnight for your customers in Melbourne, Australia! The only way you can deal with this is if your New York office works 24 hours a day!
Luckily, as virtual assistants or remote administrative assistants are based remotely, you can hire them from across the globe to cater to different time zones. This way, you and your staff can maintain a good work-life balance while still being able to attend to customers 24×7!
5. Frees Up Time For Strategic Thinking: As virtual assistants can perform your non-core activities, you have more time to focus on growing your business.
Rather than wasting time and resources in doing day-to-day operations, you can invest it to think strategically about the business from a long-term perspective. This helps you to set goals that guide your company for better performance and long-term success.
Benefits Knowledge management software in remote working
Working remotely means employees no longer have the option of walking down the hall to ask a coworker for information or guidance. This is done with the help of Knowledge Management Software.
When looking at the data of 2021, 25%-30% of the workforce transitioning is working remotely. With the knowledge management software, the employees can easily access the crucial data and share important points within the organization, anytime and anywhere.
Benefits Knowledge management software in remote working:
Adhering to SOPs: when it comes to sharing the knowledge with the customers, the knowledge base software for call center, has set clear expectations on what knowledge employees are expected to share. They have trained employees in such a way that they can easily identify which information is accurate and useful.
Access to all useful information remotely: When working from home, you have only one option to email your colleague about the doubt and just wait for the reply, who knows how long to finally get your answer. Here comes the knowledge management system in light, which gives instant and has made this process faster and more efficient.
Practise and procedures should be standardized: According to database and research, 75% of organizations believe that creating, preserving, and sharing knowledge with team members is an essential part as this will allow them to capture the best practices within the organization and set them as prime standards across your teams.
Saves time: The coming of a new employee means the training is required, but when the locations are different the handbooks are to be sent, this process is time-consuming and money consuming. To save time and make it cost-effective, with the different types of knowledge management system, you can find a more practical and effective way to train your remote workers. All you need to do is just compile all the data, upload and publish all the how-tos, manuals, and supplementary training guides into your database.
Conclusion
There are ample permutations of skills that you can outsource that relate to your business needs by hiring a virtual assistant. Only, the business owners need to identify what they would like to outsource and be sure to match their expectations with the skill set of freelancers and self-employed workers online.