Important Administrative Tasks You Can Outsource to Virtual Staff

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Important Administrative Tasks You Can Outsource to Virtual Staff

The fact that you can now hire a virtual employee is perhaps the biggest evolution in the job market history. Employers were limited to their closest vicinity when finding skilled labor for millennials. If they wanted to hire international help, they would either have to convince the employee/employees in question to move, or they would have to establish an international office.

Today, via various virtual means, this is no longer a necessity. Needles to say, this gives one an unlimited talent pool and limitless expansion options. Even for the employees, the benefits of working remotely are pretty formidable.

Now, most tasks handled by these virtual employees are either administrative or creative. Today, we’ll focus on the former group and try to explore (in-depth) how this benefits your enterprise. Here are some important administrative tasks that you can outsource to virtual staff.

Direct Communication with Clients

Organizing your emails is not a simple task, and while some services have virtually perfected spam detection, a human touch is still necessary. Outsourcing this to a human will be a lot easier for you to handle all the incoming emails.

A skilled virtual assistant can:

  • Recognize non-spam emails
  • Respond immediately when the client sends you an email
  • Assign a priority to a finance email
  • Sort these emails by categories/folders

While each task sounds simple enough even for the algorithm, it’s safer to entrust it to a virtual assistant.

Another thing you need to consider is the importance of your email management in terms of whitelisting, blacklisting, and other rules that lead to more efficient automation of your internet service.

It would be best if you also had someone who could communicate with clients via live chat. Sure, chatbots are more sophisticated than ever before, but it’s always better to chat with an actual operator. This adds an extra layer of special treatment that will drastically boost your client’s brand loyalty.

Lastly, you might want to put someone in charge of the phones. Of course, you can’t do it all on your own, but this doesn’t mean that you should deny your clients a chance to reach out to you via these means. Direct phone calls are still an effective outreach method.

Supervising Office Duties

The main reason why office supervisors had to be present on the site is that their role was tied to their physical presence on the premises. Now, when most of your workload gets handled in a digital environment, a virtual executive assistant can easily take over.

Filling out paperwork is not obsolete in the digital era. However, while some of it is automatic, data entry is still a time-consuming task that you ideally want someone else to handle.

You’re no longer ordering office supplies in these quantities, but you still need to handle software licenses, accounts and even handle/oversee your BYOD policy.

While digital meetings are a huge step forward, someone has to schedule them and ensure that it all goes according to the plan. When it comes to time management, there are a lot of employee-tracking platforms out there. Now, while they work automatically, these platforms can’t see everything. Other than this, it’s important to stress that they can be exploited. So, you need someone to check in on the rest of your virtual staff.

Helping with Your Accounting Tasks

The first accounting task you can entrust to your virtual assistant is basic bookkeeping. The majority of transactions leave digital traces, and if you’re running an online business, this is the case with all your transactions. This means that, for the most part, basic bookkeeping will be automated. All you need is someone to consolidate all this data and make sure everything checks out.

There are other accounting tasks that virtual assistants can help you out with. For instance, they can create customized client invoices to enhance your customer relationship management (CMS) efforts. By getting them a specialized CMS tool, you can make an even greater difference in this regard.

They are an insider with better oversight of your internal company processes, so they can track services and products (in relation to clients) and coordinate between the two. They can track what comes in and what goes out.

Finally, it would be best to have someone oversee the payroll and make sure that all the records are in order. This is important for your accounting and to ensure your company’s legal liability.

Managing Your Schedule

One of the reasons you don’t want to let the software handle your schedule is that it will be impossible to factor in a human factor. You want someone who understands that just because two tasks take 1 hour each, this doesn’t mean that they take the same amount of energy.

It would be best if you also had someone who understands that your role in the enterprise is pivotal but that without maintaining a healthy life-work balance, everything will fall into pieces. Finally, when an emergency erupts, the best that software can do is send you a notification (which you can ignore quite easily). With a virtual employee, this aspect of business management will become far more consistent.

Other than this, whenever you have to travel abroad, they can be the ones handling hotel and flight bookings. Moreover, they can plan your itinerary once you arrive at the target location and even prepare presentations that you will use at the meeting. In other words, they can help you focus on the presentation/meeting itself without worrying too much about the logistics.

Handling Your Social Media Profiles

Even though it’s true that you want a professional social media manager, any remote employee can set up your primary social media accounts. A remote employee can handle the first couple of days and the first couple of uploads. Later on, it would be best if you employed a professional who can still handle your accounts as a remote employee.

Encouraging engagement on social media is not a simple task. The phrasing of the post, timing, format, thumbnail, etc., are just some of the factors that affect its effectiveness. Remember, never before was marketing as traceable. All of this data, when properly analyzed, gives you an abundance of actionable information. It would be best if you found someone who understands all of this.

The key thing you need to understand is that social media management revolves heavily around problem-solving and that your problem-solving depends on the experience. In other words, it’s not a 100% transferable skill. So, finding someone who has undergone a social media marketing course is not enough. It would be best if you had someone with some experience in the field.

Lastly, it would be best if you remembered that people on social networks could be… well, difficult. This is why you need someone calm and rational. Responding positively to a negative comment can make a difference. Finding the right response to a positive comment can further fortify brand loyalty. Overall, it would be best if you had someone with the right skill set but also the right temperament for the job.

In Conclusion

As various digital platforms become more sophisticated, the list of tasks available to your virtual staff will expand further shortly. Even today, you have enterprises that function exclusively in the digital environment without even having a physical seat of the company. The above-listed tasks are just the tip of the iceberg.

Important Administrative Tasks You Can Outsource to Virtual Staff

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