Are you considering starting a business or already owning one? Are you looking for ways to reduce costs, increase profit and save time? To achieve that, you need to delegate your tasks. In this regard, remote assistance can be a valuable asset to your company.
Remote assistants are also known as virtual assistants, and this information might come in handy before you confuse the two for being different entities!
It’s the age of remote assistance service, and we have proof of our statement!
- Hiring a remote assistant can decrease companies’ costs by 78%.
- 50% of the US workforce is forecasted to be virtual professionals by 2028.
- 59% of remote assistants are full-time employees.
- 49% of companies hiring VAs/Remote Assistants have more than 1,000 employees.
- Over 50% of the employees work outside the office at least 2.5 days per week.
(Source: woosuite.com)
Quick Summary of the title!
It is challenging to determine the size of the remote assistance service industry. Statistics, however, show that the global market for outsourced services, which this sector is part of, was valued at $92.5 billion in 2019 and is on track to grow further.
(Source: Business Wire, Statista)
The demand for virtual assistant services companies is increasing because it is no longer a secret that they are an asset to any business.
However, as of a decade ago, the idea of remote assistants or relatively remote working was unheard of. Remote Work, commonly known as work from home, is a work environment wherein employees of the same department do not need to share the same physical space. Remote assistants are often spread out across different locations or time zones.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, remote assistance services were typically utilized only when special arrangements were required to be made for upper or middle management to accommodate specific cases, commuting conflicts, or hardships. These services were usually not extended as an option to the employees who form a company's foundational levels of support.
Are you puzzled by questions that we think you are?
Ultimate Questions with Remote Assistance Service
1. What are remote assistants?
Let us answer that:
A remote assistant is a self-employed, independent contractor who provides administrative, technical, and other services to a client while working remotely, out of the client's business. Remote assistants typically assist businesses with tasks that take up considerable time for their clients, such as scheduling meetings and appointments.
Remote assistants usually work from home or remote settings but have access to the digital resources required to fulfil their job. For instance, they may be able to enter data into a client's database and add appointments on their digital calendars.
Famous examples of remote assistants currently include Amazon Alexa, Siri of Apple iPhones, Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana- which is the digital assistant built into Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 10.
Now that we know what remote assistants are, let’s look at the following;
2. What services do remote assistants provide?
A virtual assistant's specific duties, tasks, and assignments can vary depending on their client's needs, but there are several everyday responsibilities. These include:
- Providing administrative plus technical support to customers
- Making calls, as well as answering and directing them
- Scheduling and managing meetings or appointments
- Securing spaces like conference rooms for in-person meetings
- Making travel arrangements and reservations on behalf of the client
- Creating lists and purchase orders for the company
- Transcribing meetings plus drafting and sharing the minutes of meetings
- Managing communications via email accounts
- Bookkeeping, shipping, and invoicing
- Conducting research online
- Creating presentations using raw data
- Entering data as well as updating databases
- Management of filing systems, updating records, and organizing documentation
- Creation and management of social media accounts
*This automatically answers the query; what is remote assistance service?
Top 5 Most In-Demand Virtual Assistant Services
1. Digital Marketing:
Digital marketing is currently at the epicentre of the online business world. One can’t do business without online marketing. Therefore, it is one of the most sought-after virtual assistant services, if not the most in-demand, nowadays.
Several services can be categorized as digital marketing, and hiring a remote assistant can help your business to upgrade its social media marketing by managing social media channels, carrying out activities such as coming up with a plan, writing posts for different platforms, posting regularly, etc.
A remote assistant in the capacity of a marketing professional can help your business with search engine optimization (SEO). Virtual Digital marketing consulting services can help with digital marketing-related tasks such as paid advertising or email marketing. Some marketers will offer blog post writing.
2. Sales:
Remote assistant services in sales are currently top-rated. This is because sales go hand in hand with marketing, and the main aim of sales is to make a business grow and prosper profitably. Therefore, a sales development remote assistant is indispensable to the lead-generation efforts of a business, along with prospecting and outreach programs. No one needs in-person sales today, and remote sales assistants can help with cold calling, prospect preparation, cold calling client follow-up calls, and pre-qualifying leads.
3. Administrative Services:
Admin services will always stay in style, remotely or from the office. However, many businesses or individuals, such as writers, influencers, entrepreneurs, etc., need personnel to take care of administrative tasks.
Whether you need remote personal assistant services or a remote executive assistant, remote administrative professionals can assist your business with the tasks that administrative assistants can help you with, such as; managing the calendar, email management, making travel arrangements, sending cards to clients, and other concierge-related tasks.
A traditional assistant can be hired only for one business, while a remote assistance service can provide services for different clients.
4. Bookkeeping:
The definition of bookkeeping, as per Oxford, is “the job or activity of keeping an accurate record of the accounts of a business.” It is an imperative activity for businesses, but not all business owners can track their business transactions thoroughly.
This is a lousy task, but businesses need to know where they spend their hard-earned money and make better financial decisions accordingly.
If you avail of remote accounting and bookkeeping services, the services you’ll avail of are:
- Preparation of tax returns.
- Monitored performance indicators.
- Reconciliation of bank statements with financial statements.
- Cash flow analysis.
5. Website Development and Design:
Today, most businesses require a website to showcase their products and services to a broader range of audience online. The traditional way of website development is to hire a full-time web developer and a web designer.
However, today’s business operations shift to save costs and hire a custom web design and development assistant or more than one remote assistant to take care of your official website. This way, you can start creating a website and maintaining it with the least possible business budget.
Types of Remote Assistants that can help boost your business:
Administrative remote assistant
Remote administrative assistant services command expertise over office management, scheduling, data entry, phone calls, and back-office duties like expense and bookkeeping.
Everything that falls under the purview of management of an office- and that can be overseen remotely- lies within their sphere of responsibility.
Sales remote assistant
A sales remote assistant is a contractor who helps you build a more efficient sales process via cold outreach over the phone and email to find new consumers, nurture prospective leads, and close business deals.
Customer support remote assistant
Remote assistance service in the customer service arena includes handling calls and emails to offer your clients an overall pleasant experience. They also respond to queries, guide customers through sales processes, process refund requests, manage CRM, and gather feedback to strengthen the current system at your organization.
Marketing remote assistant
A marketing remote assistant crafts and executes your marketing strategy on all fronts, including search engines, social media, and email. They render tailored content for every channel and help you bring your best game to the table.
Circling back to the question of the hour,
Why are Remote Assistant Services currently in demand?
1. Remote assistant services are cost-saving:
All companies, regardless of size, look for ways to save money on overhead. With a business, every little bit counts. As a result, several enterprises are downsizing, from acquiring expensive corporate spaces to eliminating the practice of redundant employee hiring.
Instead of traditional practices, business owners are looking to save money by investing in remote assistants who are knowledgeable about what the business deals with and are comfortable working with cloud-based technologies.
Moreover, business owners are also finding they can reduce their capital needs by outsourcing tasks to virtual assistants. The cost of engaging in a remote assistant is substantially less than hiring traditional employees in large parts.
Business owners do not have to pay the same taxes they would be paying for a full-time employee or provide employee benefits such as medical healthcare or a paid vacation leave to remote assistants.
Remote assistants can perform different tasks due to their exposure to other industries. Remote assistants must acquire knowledge of new trends and train on various platforms. This makes it cost-saving for business owners as they get remote assistants who are aware of the updated trends in the field and save costs on employee training.
Remote assistants are in high demand because they allow business owners to lower their costs of business practices while building up their teams efficiently and increasing the quality of the work produced simultaneously.
2. Remote working is highly beneficial:
Because remote assistants work from home and can flexibly utilize schedules, they are typically happier workers who work more productively than regular employees and stay engaged with their company for extended periods.
Another reason for remote assistants being in high demand is because, with remote workers, there is less churn. And suppose a remote assistant does step away. In that case, it is comparatively less costly to replace them with an employee having a similar set of skills as compared to replacing a traditional employee.
3. They cater to specific needs and requirements:
Remote assistants are hired based on the specific requirements of a business or an entrepreneur. They can be brought on as part-time or full-time team members who are paid hourly or contracted project-by-project as and when the need arises.
Remote assistance service is only paid for the work completed as agreed upon, either verbally or contractually, at the beginning of this professional relationship. However, due to fluctuating cash flows, several business owners find this arrangement preferable and cost-effective than bringing an employee into a traditional work environment. In addition, not having to provide physical office space, work desks, computers, etc., helps keep the overhead costs low.
Additionally, because remote assistant servants often work for multiple clients, they are used to adapting to different management styles. This allows them to quickly learn the dos and don’ts of various business systems and environments.
Without constantly training a traditional employee on new technologies or emerging platforms, business owners save more capital to invest in other business areas.
4. Time-Saving:
Remote assistants typically take on administrative, tactile, or repetitive tasks, and they can, by large, free up the time of other team members to perform tasks more inclined toward revenue building or lead generation.
Tasks like taking notes, submitting reports of monthly expenses, tracking invoices, creating content for social media platforms, and responding to customer inquiries are essential for the operation of a business.
Yet, these tasks take a lot of time when other crucial tasks are to be performed.
When business owners delegate these additional services to a virtual assistant, they acquire the mind space to think strategically, focus on expanding their network with energy and enthusiasm, and develop new ideas for the business.
Remote assistance service is in demand because they work within the business, allowing owners and entrepreneurs to work on other essential aspects of their business.
5. Positive Impact on Businesses:
When business owners aren't locked into low-level tasks that are just as essential, they can innovate and grow their companies. For example, remote assistance service is currently extremely high in demand because the statistics show that outsourcing administrative tasks, such as calendar management, customer support efforts, email management, and blog writing, can efficiently bridge the gap between start-ups and growth! Notable, isn’t it?
84.4% of business owners interviewed by VirtuDesk put forward their views about a positive impact on their business since they’ve outsourced tasks to a remote assistant. In addition, several reports hitting high growth rates owing to the contributions of their remote assistants stated that they could focus more on complicated tasks by availing of services like remote executive assistant service.
Remote assistants, in general, have formed a bias towards learning, which can be an added benefit to business owners who require more time or capacity to be forward-looking regarding training.
6. Allows you to outsource talent:
If you are a business owner, who’s burnt out on blog writing or tired of having to come up with clever social media posts each day constantly, you begin to find this time to be dreadful when you have to spend doing these tasks.
While you have committed to your social media strategy, writing takes more time for everyone, and you might find building posts tedious and frustrating. In addition, the anticipation of this task each week will further cause stress and social anxiety, which can be a distraction even when performing other tasks.
Just realizing that you need to sit down and spend your time developing a blog for your website can be distressing! This might lead to you winding up, procrastinating, or spinning your wheels toward exhaustion with valuable hours down the drain.
Blog writing and social media management are perfect to outsource to an efficient remote assistance service. A creative remote assistant can wind up this essential job in less time than it would take you to complete. In addition, remote assistants are equipped with skills to find your voice and channel your brand's message via powerful posts that convert your target audience and page visitors to subscribers!
7. Scope for Scalability:
Business owners are no strangers when it comes to an increase in their workload with onboarding a new client, additional client requirements to fulfil, or an in-house employee’s unplanned leave.
Such situations demand quick thinking on the feet and swift action from the central management.
Yet, due to the occasional increase, most find it challenging to invest in a lucrative compensation package for a full-time employee hire. Remote assistance service acts as a perfect set of extra hands to complete those specific projects within the set time frame without burning a hole in the pocket of businesses.
Bottom line!
Remote assistance service is the future of businesses. Of course, remote assistant services have been around for ages, but the pandemic has made it more evident that remote work is the way to go!
Additionally, there are many perks to working as a remote assistant, and businesses benefit from remote assistance services because with remote assistants, you only have to pay for the service they provide without paying for any unnecessary costs.
