What is a virtual assistant, and why would you want one?

A virtual assistant is like a personal assistant, but they don’t sit in your office – they may be on the other side of the world.  A virtual assistant can help you free up your time and take your business to the next level.  Find out more about getting your own virtual assistant and how a virtual assistant can work for you.

What can a virtual assistant do?  Well, they can do anything that doesn’t require them to be physically present.  In practice, you’ll want to use them for work that can be easily communicated by email or IM.  Imagine employing a new assistant.  He or she is not a mind reader.  At the same time, the person is a continent away.  You can understand the need to use the virtual assistant for work that can be clearly defined or communicated.

Despite what has been written about getting someone to set up dates or take care of personal tasks, a virtual assistant is best suited for business tasks (unless you can afford to spend a fair amount of money getting someone to do personal work for you).  Most of the work that I have done with virtual assistants uses people located in developing countries due to the cost advantage, but I had one for a while here in Australia (where labour costs are very high).  In both cases, the critical success factor was in clearly defining what needed to be done.

Generally, I have used virtual assistants as needed for work such as data entry and writing.  My virtual assistant here in Australia provided the back end for a software business – sending out stock and answering emails.  I’ve also been involved in setting up virtual assistants to provide live help – sourced from a firm that specialises in doing this.

The benefit of a virtual assistant is that you don’t have to employ a full time person locally or provide office space.  You can generally save money by only paying for the time you use them, and if you get someone from a developing country, you can take advantage of their lower costs.  The lower costs allow you to provide services and get work done and provide customer services that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do if you were relying on the traditional employment model.  A virtual assistant can take the load of administrative work off your shoulders if you are busy trying to run a business and at a low cost.

For offshore resources, I use Rentacoder.  Another option is ELance.  In both cases you can post your requirements and prospective assistants can post their bids, and you can check their service quality.   There are a number of firms (especially in India) that provide a complete virtual assistant service (that do everything that you would expect from an executive assistant), but I think that they are expensive.  Unless you need something complex, there are far lower cost options.

Whilst India is a popular source of virtual assistants due to having a lot of well educated, English speaking resources, don’t overlook Bangladesh, Pakistan or even places like South Africa or Uruguay.  Of course, virtual assistants are also located in the United States.  You could source someone locally by setting up a basis for working with them.

If you use someone from a developing country, you are likely to get lower costs, but more variable quality.  You must bear in mind that different countries have different cultures and different business approaches and that can lead to communications issues.  I like to test the waters slowly, first trying out the assistant with low criticality tasks before relying on them for more important work.  I like to check the work carefully to make sure that the quality is as expected.  This allows issues to be resolved early.  It will also identify any problems with the performance of the firm you have selected, including any issues with their response times or infrastructure.

As I mentioned, it is important to provide very clear instructions.  You need to know what you want, not expect the assistant to somehow know.  As time goes on, you will be able to rely on their understanding of your requirements.

Good luck with your virtual assistant.  If you have any insights into virtual assistants, please share them by adding your comments.

Tags: freedom, subversive, virtual assistant

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Daily subversive tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.