If you run a cleaning business, you have probably noticed that as your business grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with some of the details and menial tasks involved. You may be overwhelmed by tedious work that you don’t have the time for, work that’s necessary to keep things running smoothly. You have likely realized that you need more help, but hiring local help for these duties can be expensive and impractical. If you haven’t considered it before, it may be time to think about hiring a small business virtual assistant. These experienced professionals are a cost-effective choice that you can hire to perform part-time services to reduce the workload on your full-time staff. This increases your employee productivity, and in turn, improves your bottom line.
How Do You Know if You Need a Virtual Assistant?
When you are trying to decide if you should hire a virtual assistant, it is vital to look at the duties your assistant could take on to make your job easier and give your staff more time to focus on their priorities.
Look at the Duties a Virtual Assistant Can Perform
- Answering phone calls and providing quality customer service, including special service requests, rescheduling, sales, quote callbacks, and handling complaints
- Advertising your business on social media
- Focusing on high-priority tasks
- Answering customer questions on your website chatbox
Managing your accounts receivable, invoices, payments, emails, and following up with clients who are behind on payments - Managing your payroll
- Checking with customers on their satisfaction and encouraging them to leave positive reviews, and in the case of poor reviews, working with the client to see how you can improve their experience
- Sending customer surveys to gain additional feedback
- Implementing new software programs and assisting with training staff on these systems
- Assisting with your hiring process by listing open positions, collecting applications, and scheduling interviews
- Scheduling customers next cleaning appointment
- Ordering new cleaning supplies
- Tracking cleaning supplies inventory
- Scheduling cleaning staff
- And more!
How Do You Train a Virtual Assistant to Meet Your Needs?
Every business is different, and it is vital to have a plan for preparing your virtual assistant for the tasks you expect them to perform so that they can help your business become more efficient and bring in more revenue.
Training Tips for Your Virtual Assistant
- The first step in ensuring that your virtual assistant will handle the jobs you expect of them is to list the tasks you want them to perform. Create a task list and prioritize the more important items, so they know which items should be completed first. It may benefit you to choose the daily tasks that take up the most of your time that you could spend on more meaningful endeavors. Be sure to pace your training program so that your assistant doesn’t feel overwhelmed right off the bat.
- Train your virtual assistant on the specifics of the way you like your phone answered, and prepare them with a list of commonly asked questions and the responses you wish them to provide to clients. It is easier to have this information in a well-organized folder than asking them to memorize responses right away.
- Be sure that your virtual assistant knows what you expect of them in terms of phone call response time and how quickly you expect them to respond to emails, text messages, and other communications. Be careful not to set unrealistic expectations—your virtual assistant is human, so don’t expect more than you would from any other employee.
- Take time in the first few weeks of working with your virtual assistant to get to know them and build a trusting employer/employee relationship. Have weekly meetings to check in and see how things are going with them. Monitor them from a distance so that they don’t feel that you are micromanaging, and be understanding if they make a few mistakes at first.
Call on Virtual Latinos to Help You
Once you see the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant for your cleaning business, doing so will help your business to grow. Virtual Latinos is one of the top virtual assistant services that can connect you with college-educated, bilingual virtual assistants from countries like Uruguay, Argentina, and Mexico. Our company has built a reputation for trustworthy, cost-effective virtual assistants that improve customer service, employee productivity, and help businesses grow. Call us today at (619) 317-1198 or visit our website to find out how we can help your cleaning business.
