For many years, one of the biggest failures that several eCommerce sellers have made was their failure to recognize the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant. Sure, hiring virtual assistants (VAs) may be financially difficult for a starting entrepreneur, but if you are intending to grow your business or gearing it up for success, then delegating some tasks is inevitable. In this post, I’m going to show you the top 5 reasons why you should hire a virtual assistant in 2020. Keep posted because we have a special tip by the end of this post.
If you are not sure if you are the right person to hire a VA, then read this guide on how to know if your business is in need of a virtual assistant.
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1. Improving your Productivity Curve
One of the most obvious reasons for hiring a virtual assistant is increased productivity. When you are starting out with your business, it might make sense to do most (if not all) the tasks yourself. This way, you become knowledgeable of how each business process and strategy fit with each other. However, if you are dealing with a growing business, doing all of the tasks yourself would surely stifle your momentum for growth. This is in line with what economists call the Yerkes-Dodson law or the productivity curve. To understand this concept, take a look at the figure below.
As could be seen above, doing all the tasks yourself is only productive up to a certain point (Point B). This is because when too much stress or arousal is present, a reduction in your overall performance occurs. Accordingly, this also suggests that by hiring a virtual assistant, you reduce your stress and focus on the most important tasks, thereby allowing you to increase your productivity and improve your business’ profitability (Point C).
However, one important thing to note is that hiring a VA requires you to take into consideration the right tools and proper management techniques to maximize your returns. Without doing this, you run the risk of incurring losses and endangering your brand’s customer base.
louis aguila; founder, amazon one step
2. Increasing your Business Profitability
It was stated earlier that one of the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant and delegating your routine tasks is the potential of improving your profitability through increased productivity. However, there are also several other reasons why this process can improve customer loyalty and brand recognition.
a. Increasing Sales Revenues
First, studies have shown that “a virtual assistant could save up to 78% in operating costs per year”. This is particularly true for large-scale companies (or eCommerce stores) that hire traditional employees to run the business since it reduces the costs of training, gearing, and manpower, among others. Even though smaller-scale companies or startups would have a different amount of savings rate (since they do not hire full-time employees), VAs can help reduce their operating, marketing, and other sales-related expenses as compared to hiring a regular employee.
Additionally, it is also a common misconception that owners of startups or small online stores would not lose money since they are doing all the tasks themselves. It must be noted that even small websites have to pay ‘tangible’ costs like hosting provision, domain registration, plugin subscriptions, and even utility bills. There are also intangible yet essential factors to consider one of which is your ‘opportunity costs’. Opportunity cost simply refers to the loss of the potential gain that you could have derived if you have chosen the alternatives to one option (i.e., going to work instead of managing the site). This shows that hiring affordable (not low-quality) VAs could prove crucial for improving your product’s profitability in the long-run.
b. Leveraging Virtual Assistant Skills
Second, you can also take advantage of the fact that most VAs are part-time employees that have diverse work and educational experience. In fact, surveys show that about 60% of VAs have college degrees, vast experience, and a full-time job where they learn all sorts of things from management, to marketing, and even to customer-dispute resolution. In my personal experience as a long-time entrepreneur, I realized that although these kinds of VAs might cost a little bit more, it pays to have them in both the short– and the long–run. High-quality VAs would provide exceptional value to your business by helping increase sales revenue and mitigating errors, which reduces the costs of excessive penalties or litigation costs. Additionally, I also realized from my experience in managing my store and my VA agency that since the VAs have a diverse work experience, training them to manage several platforms such as Amazon, eBay, and Shopify is easy and cost-efficient.
In other words, it is essential to choose high-quality yet affordable virtual assistants rather than cheap ones if you are serious about your own business.
3. Maximizing Customer Satisfaction
One of the most crucial aspects of any eCommerce store is customer satisfaction. Marketers of any business know that by improving customer satisfaction, retention rates would significantly improve. In turn, this establishes a loyal consumer base for the organization, which reduces the resources needed to increase conversion rate. In one article written by McEachern about customer retention, he noted that companies which focus on client satisfaction to improve customer retention exponentially increase their rate of sales per day.
Although it might seem straightforward, it must be noted that increasing customer retention requires a disciplined and strategic focus on key metrics that drive customer satisfaction such as response time, response quality, and the overall experience of the service, among others. This simply suggests how important high-quality VAs are in establishing your store’s customer base. Without delegating these tasks or by delegating them to inexperienced VAs, you run the risks of having your competitors steal your precious clients from you.
4. Hiring Flexibility
Whether it be for a small eCommerce site or an established online store, owners (or managers) are burdened with the task of choosing effective employees that fits the company’s goals, culture, and ideologies. This process usually entails a lot of risks since domestic labor laws in some jurisdiction does not allow wrongful discharge or termination of employees. In fact, many of the lawsuits that are being filed regarding illegal termination result in lengthy and costly litigation. In contrast to this, one of the main benefits of hiring a virtual assistant is that they could be hired on a per-project basis. Since VAs are either independent contractors or freelancers, your business would have greater flexibility in managing, negotiating, hiring (and firing inefficient) your employees. Take note that this does not mean that you should terminate VAs regularly. Instead, this simply aims to emphasize the fact that VAs give you the flexibility to find and hire (and grow with) high-quality VAs.
5. Improving Personal Well-being
Finally, one of the most important but underrated benefits of hiring a Virtual Assistant is a positive improvement in your own well-being. Since you are reading this article, I assume that you are one of the people who know that creating your own business would give you more time and flexibility than a traditional desk job. However, many of us would realize that starting your own eCommerce brand would demand even longer hours at first, especially if you are only trying to build your customer base. In fact, despite working from the comforts of your home, studies show that some of the problems that Work-from-Home (WFH) setups include “unplugging from work, loneliness, and distractions”, among others.
By hiring VAs to do some of the more routine and managerial tasks of your business, you increase your happiness and well-being as you find the time to play with your children, watch a movie, or catch up with your friends. In turn, this would give you the most returns to your investment as you can scale your business and prevent costly illnesses at the same time.
Now that you have read the top 5 benefits of hiring a VA, the next section provides one unique advantage that you should now as early as now.
Special Tip: Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Assistant and Empowering them through Virtual Assistant Technology.
In this time of significant technological advancement, one of the most critical questions is whether to hire a human virtual assistant or use the available virtual assistant technologies in the market. While we’ve answered this question in the negative in one of our posts, the good news is that VA technology and human VAs do not exist in isolation from one another. Instead, studies have found that Virtual Assistant technologies can work hand-in-hand with human VAs in delivering better service and generating more sales from different consumer segments. For example, in Drift’s 2018 State of Chatbots Report, it could be seen that Millennials and Baby Boomers have varying perceptions about the different benefits of chatbots. There is also a general consensus between the two that this technology is still lacking in some aspects including ‘friendliness and approachability’ and ‘answering complex questions’, among others.
In other words, this shows that rather than existing as a separate solution for your customers’ needs, VA technologies exist as a complementary tool to tailor and optimize your CRM in the best way possible.
Conclusion
Now that you have read about the top reasons to hire a virtual assistant this 2020, the next step is finding the perfect VA for you. Again, I want to emphasize the importance of balancing between affordability and high-quality in hiring a virtual assistant. If you can’t wait to scale your business immediately feel free to sign up and schedule your free consultation. Also, you can check our blog on the Definitive Guide to Finding the Perfect Overseas Virtual Assistant [2020].
