Making a Positive Business Evaluation of Staff, Cost and Service Trade-offs

Could A Virtual PA Help Your Business?

A business’s relationship between its staffing budget and customer service levels is a fine balancing act that needs careful consideration.

More and more as the recession bites, middle management are being requested to tighten their belts and being handed reduced budgets to work towards, with the instruction not only to prevent standards from slipping, but where possible to improve upon them.

As important as a brand new prospect is to a business, companies are recognising that the importance of treating existing clients like gold dust to ensure customer loyalty and repeat business is paramount.

So how do you increase business efficiency and reduce costs whilst continuing to ensure you’re providing an excellent first impression and increasing your customer care levels?

Outsourcing an element of your call handling requirements to a Virtual Assistant Business may well be the answer and here’s why:

So how could a Virtual Assistant help your business?

Firstly, by using a Virtual Assistant you will free up your existing staff from being tied to the phones. You will not be using a multi skilled employee, trained to serve your business to their full potential if 50% of their day is spent fielding calls that could be directed elsewhere with the same results. This will allow your team to focus on their core roles which will increase productivity immeasurably.

Always available to take your calls!

Your Virtual Receptionist will be able to answer all calls all of the time. Unlike your own staff or phone lines, there is no limit to the volume of calls a Virtual PA Service can take on your behalf at any one time, and because your Virtual PA will be backed up by a team of call handlers, your caller will never be unable to get through or be kept waiting for a specific person.

Will your calls be answered professionally?

Answering calls professionally is what a Virtual Assistant does. This is all a Virtual Assistant does and because this is their only role they are experts in their field, making the most of every conversation on your behalf. You can have your PAs trained to do as much or as little on your call as your business requires.

What are the levels of service available and what options do you have?

Do you need your Virtual PA to check your diary and book or amend appointments? Do you need them to co-ordinate your engineers based on their location? Do you need them to run through a list of FAQs with your caller to log the severity of the job before it gets sent across to your technical department to deal with? Well, all of the above and countless other scenarios is no problem to a Virtual Assistant!

Maybe you simply need you PA to just take a basic message, and send the details across to you immediately by email or SMS for you to co ordinate the follow up at your end. Whatever your requirement there will be a Virtual PA Service to suit your needs.

When it comes to customer care, the ability to use a Virtual Assistant to offer call handling outside of standard office hours is of huge benefit to many businesses. When you consider the cost implications of paying staff to be on call outside of standard office hours, many businesses struggle to bring in contracts with 24 hour SLAs on budget. However with an outsourced Virtual Assistant these costs are slashed, as you simply pay for the calls you receive, which means that you can open up your services to an extended market.

Outsourcing to Virtual Assistants has really taken off in the last 10 years and with an increasingly  ‘do more pay less’ mentality it is not hard to see why it is becoming the smart option for the savvy, cost conscious business owner who puts customers first.