Saturday, April 9, 2011

What’s on the Menu? Services offered by Virtual Assistant Companies

During the recession when many businesses crumble into pieces and economic meltdown is as common as oxygen, businessmen tried to find ways to cut cost. Luckily they were able to. Recession not only has a negative effect on the economy at that time in fact it became a seedbed of new business ideas and solutions. One business that boomed during the recession is virtual assistance. At first it was only a home-based business by entrepreneurs who mostly were victims of recession but later when many investors saw that the demand for virtual assistants increased they became aware that it could be a good business. So many businessmen put up virtual assistant companies. These companies offer services beyond those offered by freelancers. Freelancer virtual assistants are those who are on their own and not connected to a company they are the home-based virtual assistants. So what are these services that virtual assistant companies offer to their clients, who are mostly companies.

Multi-Tasking Virtual Assistant

If you are going to search the web for the services of various virtual assistant companies scattered all throughout the planet you can conclude that they provide redundant services. I mean they all got the same services. And if you are even meticulous and dig deeper you can noticed that they can be categorized into three major categories. The three major categories are virtual assistance, business support services, and IT services.

Virtual Assistance

Services classified as virtual assistance are those involving administrative and clerical jobs. Like secretarial works. Commonly included in this category are administrative support and phone services. Examples of administrative support are data encoding, simple web research, personal assistant, email response, transcription and word processing. Receptionist services, taking messages, call answering and transfer, order taking and processing, customer service, and telephone support are included in the phone services.

Business Support Services

Virtual assistant companies can also offer business support services. As the name suggest business support services are indeed meant to provide support for other companies or businesses. This category of services by virtual assistant companies is further subdivided into three sub categories; these are business services, sales and social media marketing, and content writing.  Business services offered by virtual assistant companies are accounting, bookkeeping, human resource management, project management, recruiting, CRM management, and business research and surveys. Sales and social media marketing are also in the list of services offered by virtual assistant companies and these includes advertising, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, email marketing, lead generation,  and sales assistance. Virtual assistant companies also provide content writing service that increases the ranking of businesses in search engines. Content writing services include article writing, blog writing, copy writing, ghost writing, and newsletter.

IT Services

IT services are yet another service provided by virtual assistant companies that made them in demand over freelancers who might not able to provide this service category. This service of virtual assistant companies includes web development and maintenance, website security, server administration, technical support, blog creation, forum moderation. This service is one that separates virtual assistant companies from their freelance counterpart.

As they are meant to provide cheap yet quality services to businessmen who are cutting cost by outsourcing, virtual assistant companies offers services that has fixed prices or what they call as plans. This scheme, the plans, was made so that businessmen will be able to decide which plan they will choose that will fit their budget.

If you are going to look at it, virtual assistant companies are like restaurants. Like a restaurant they got value meals and menus where customers can choose which menu will suit their budget. And like restaurants they tailored their services in such a way that will always be palatable to their clients. After all its customer satisfaction that matters most.

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