Is It Time To Have a Virtual Assistant

Are you wondering why your colleague can finish all the tasks and still has time to enjoy a good eight to ten hours of sleep? While here you are, cramming with all your business’ paperwork and emails at the wee hours of the night.


The sound of hiring someone to fill the position of doing administrative tasks like answering your calls, checking the email, accounting, etc., worries you about the expense of letting another person in to your company, tagging along company responsibilities like employee benefits and other needed actions for employee retention.

Worry no more about these issues that keep on nagging your mind. The outsourcing industry has offered yet another solution to your woes.

Virtual assistants, or commonly called as VAs, are the persons in charge to handle the tasks that is covered by the answering service. The VA can be a single person who owns and manages his/her own answering service business or they can be working for a Call Center Outsourcing company.

Most of the VAs work as self-employed individuals who offer services like administrative, technical, creative (social) tasks to professionals who need to gets all the work done. Most of the people who avail of the VA services are doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other high-ranking people who need secretarial services, yet don’t want to hire a person literally.

VAs can also come from call center outsourcing companies which offer virtual assistance services to various clients—from individual professionals to small businesses. Outsourcing companies can assign one or a group of VAs to do the specific tasks that need to be done by the client.

There are an estimated 25,000 virtual assistants worldwide, an indication that it is a growing profession in centralized economies where high attrition staffing practices is rampant.

Hiring the service of a VA is one strategic move for any individual or business. VAs does not make their clients responsible for any employee-related taxes and any insurance and benefits. Clients are also saved from adding spared office space, equipment and supply. The only expense clients have to shoulder is the direct payment for the service, either to a single VA or multi-VAs.

But it should be remembered that self-employed virtual assistants are not employees but business owners; thus, they gauge their own rate and formulate their own standards and policies, pay their own employment taxes and control the management of his/her work flow.

VAs from Call Center outsourcing companies are managed and directed on what they have to work on. They are paid by the call center company they are working for. Thus, bear in mind that you are not their direct boss, but you are one of their customers.

The common modes of communication and data delivery are the Internet, e-mail, phone call conferences, online work space and fax machines. VAs in this business works in a contractual basis; thus, cooperation between the client and the VA is significant.

Many of the VAs specialize in tasks, that is why most of them are also called Virtual Specialists. Most common tasks that would be specialized by VAs include Marketing, Web Design and Programming, Social Media, Bookkeeping, Reception, sales and management. But besides these, most VAs can provide across-the-board administrative work.

Whether you are a professional that needs general secretarial services or a business owner who also needs to accomplish all the administrative tasks, the VA/VAs needed would depend on the volume, type and the variety of work that needs to be done.

VA services mostly come with minimum cost, compared to the expense of hiring an actual person for the job; thus, critics about the service have also surfaced. One common critic is that you get what you paid for. If you availed for an hourly service for only $3 compared to an hourly service of $5, you don’t have the full power to expect the most sophisticated work delivered to you.

Also, since VAs usually come from different time zones, challenges in communication and maintaining the contact is also questioned. Many have experienced disruption of service from VAs coming from three time zones away, so how much more for those from ten time zones away? There’s no need to worry that much about this. Many of these VAs offer free trial periods for you to try and evaluate their service.

In conclusion, the pros and cons of acquiring virtual assistance services are always present. After all, not all things are good enough. In the end, you are the one who’ll decide whether or not hiring a VA is a must for you and your business. Just weigh the pros and cons and your needs, and you can come up with the answer anytime soon.

About the Author

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Publish on 09/26/2012

Shiela - freelance copywriter specializing in topics about the general services and qualities of a call center Philippines houses. Her expertise in the topic stems from having had worked for a few call centers and a BPO company offering a variety of services.

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