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Virtual Assistants can help every business. Virtual assistants are the unsung heroes of virtual staffing. The term virtual assistant does not do justice to all the diverse ways assistants can help a business. Virtual assistant staff augmentation makes up a sizable portion of the roles we fill here at Valenta. In this article we will cover some of the industries we have provided virtual assistants for. We will also cover how a virtual office assistant can help in all departments and aspects of a business.
Businesses We Have Served with Virtual Assistant
We have provided many online virtual assistants to a variety of business types and industries. We serve many professional service providers including Accountants, Law Practitioners, Financial Planners, Insurance companies, Medical practices, Real Estate Investment firms, Property Management providers and more.
Virtual assistants staff augmentation personnel become part of the staff of our clients and assume specific duties required in these businesses. Paralegals in a law office is a specific type of virtual assistant. Paraplanners at a Financial Planning provider is another role that is quite popular among our clients. In the area of medical practices, a virtual office assistant can take on billing and claims roles.
They can also assume the duties of a medical scribe for the doctor. Real Estate investment firms can also assign a virtual office assistant responsibility in the areas of property management for leasing agreements, collections of rents. Interactions with tenants and service providers, and more.
They can also be given assignments to research new properties for investment and to set up meetings with the principals and brokers of potential new properties. When it comes to virtual assistant staff augmentation if there is a well define job description, and if the duties do not require in person contact, chances are it might make sense to look at an online virtual assistant.
Parts of a Business that Can Benefit from Virtual Assistants
Every company no matter the size has five departments that can benefit from virtual assistant staff augmentation. Those departments are, Accounting & Finance, Sales & Marketing, Human Resources, Information Technology and Operations.
• Appointment setting for a sales team is a terrific way to leverage an online virtual assistant. In this role they are acting as an inside salesperson who does not necessarily have to have a deep knowledge of a company’s products or services. Customer and prospect research can also be assigned to a virtual assistant as can lead list creation and management. A virtual office assistant could also be given telemarketing tasks for events a company is planning.
• Within a Marketing department, market research can be assigned to virtual assistants as can research focused on strategy initiatives.
• Human Resources is another department where many onboarding and offboarding functions can be assigned to trained virtual staff along with benefits administration.
• In the area of Operations, Supply Chain is one function that frequently needs help tracking orders, ensuring deliveries and involves a high amount of work that can be offloaded.
• Customer support departments can benefit from staff augmentation as well. SMB clients we serve may not wish to set up large call centers but having virtual first line workers who take over that first level of support can offload considerable hours. Companies that have automated much of their customer support workflow may still need a human in the loop and this role can be filled with staff augmentation.
• There is also still a need for classical use case virtual assistants, as Executive Assistants. An online virtual assistant can manage calendars, emails, agenda preparation, meeting action item capture, presentation preparation, and many other items.
To put all of this in perspective looking at the salaries for various roles in different cities can help. On Glassdoor (https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/index.htm) the salary of an executive assistant is 66.4K USD in Denver Colorado. It is 57K CAD in Toronto Canada. These rates do not take into account office costs, infrastructure, taxes and benefits. Outsourced personnel can often be obtained for 50% to 60% less than these salaries.
Want to Learn More?
Everything we do at Valenta is about helping companies focus on and have time for what they do best and their core mission.  We do this through process consulting, digital transformation, and the automation of tasks. We also do this by providing staff augmentation, virtual staffing, and outsourcing.
Valenta is focused exclusively on SMB clients, typically enterprise customers with 10-1,000 employees. However, we have customers with more and less than these numbers of employees. Most tier one consulting and outsourcing firms so far have only focused on Fortune 500 or Fortune 1,000 companies.
In addition to providing specialized virtual assistants some of the staff augmentation we provide includes bookkeeping, accountants, financial crime personnel, project managers, IT staff, managed IT, software developers, software administrators, digital marketing, AI and machine learning specialists, data analysts and scientists, IT security analysts, and much more.