Making Effective use of your VA
Posted 02-04-2009 at 01:16 PM by therajeevkistoo
Hi Warriors
Thanks for having a peep on my blog.
If you are new to outsourcing and using Virtual Assistance, there are some basics you should know so that you do not throw money out of the window and also get the best out of your resources.
Your VA is a Human Being, build a rapport.
It is true that you pay good money to hire VA services but if you want your job to be done efficiently, you should be able to build a rapport. Most of the time VAs are hardworking people who will do all sort of tasks that you don’t want to handle as long as they get paid for it and also spend most of their time in front of a computer. That said, they do not have face to face contact with people and that can be monotonous sometimes and the quality of work highly depend on the appreciation that you show when a job is done well.
If give you a task and it is wrongly done, do not just pack up and try to find another VA. You will waste time and money doing this and it is a matter of how you give your instructions to the VA and everyone needs training. Bear in mind that a VA might have worked for many clients before but your task can always be unique and the result you want from the same task might be different.
For e.g If you have a need to find a company that sells leads for people want to buy cars, don’t tell your VA ” Find me a company that sells leads of people wanting to buy cars” . Be more specific and think like your VA. Which country, which region, what type of cars you want to sell, what is your budget range, do you want her/him to just to google search, do you want calls to be made, do want emails to be sent, do you want the information sent to you by a specific date and time, do you want them to spent 4 hours do or more doing this ?
There are so many variables which can help the VA get better results, it will take you a few more minutes jotting down the bullet points, but it will save your VA a lot of guessing and you will obviously pay less for the job. It is always very important to give examples of good results and also bad results so that the VA understand what exactly you are looking for and it is far easier than writing 200 words explaining what you need done.
Timekeeping
If you are not careful from the very begining with timekeeping, you will regret it very quickly. As soon as you get a deal closed with a VA service or even during the trial period, you should ask them how they do time tracking and how is it reported to you. What happens if you do no agree with the amount of time spent or the what happens if instructions were not followed and time was wrongly spent. These are the basic questions you should ask yourself and the VA.
It is highly recommended to assign timescales to eash task you assign. If you know a project will take more than 20/30 hours then make sure you get an update every 5 hours and see how it is progressing. It is advisable to extend a heavy task on a 4 hour daily basis, research has proven that VAs perform better on a single task if they work shorter hours a day on that particular project. There is no point expecting a project that needs 30 hours done in 2 days, you cannot expect quality work like this.
Training Your VA
Using outsourcing or VA service has been very beneficial to me and I learned by mistakes. I am just giving some tips so that you can make good use of your money and be a happy outsourcer. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me on rajeevkistoo@gmail.com or if you do not want to waste your time on elance.com looking for a VA company, get in touch with me on rajeev.kistoo for a free consultation.
All the best and be Happy
ps: You can get in touch with me through http://www.rajeevkistoo.com
Thanks for having a peep on my blog.
If you are new to outsourcing and using Virtual Assistance, there are some basics you should know so that you do not throw money out of the window and also get the best out of your resources.
Your VA is a Human Being, build a rapport.
It is true that you pay good money to hire VA services but if you want your job to be done efficiently, you should be able to build a rapport. Most of the time VAs are hardworking people who will do all sort of tasks that you don’t want to handle as long as they get paid for it and also spend most of their time in front of a computer. That said, they do not have face to face contact with people and that can be monotonous sometimes and the quality of work highly depend on the appreciation that you show when a job is done well.
If give you a task and it is wrongly done, do not just pack up and try to find another VA. You will waste time and money doing this and it is a matter of how you give your instructions to the VA and everyone needs training. Bear in mind that a VA might have worked for many clients before but your task can always be unique and the result you want from the same task might be different.
For e.g If you have a need to find a company that sells leads for people want to buy cars, don’t tell your VA ” Find me a company that sells leads of people wanting to buy cars” . Be more specific and think like your VA. Which country, which region, what type of cars you want to sell, what is your budget range, do you want her/him to just to google search, do you want calls to be made, do want emails to be sent, do you want the information sent to you by a specific date and time, do you want them to spent 4 hours do or more doing this ?
There are so many variables which can help the VA get better results, it will take you a few more minutes jotting down the bullet points, but it will save your VA a lot of guessing and you will obviously pay less for the job. It is always very important to give examples of good results and also bad results so that the VA understand what exactly you are looking for and it is far easier than writing 200 words explaining what you need done.
Timekeeping
If you are not careful from the very begining with timekeeping, you will regret it very quickly. As soon as you get a deal closed with a VA service or even during the trial period, you should ask them how they do time tracking and how is it reported to you. What happens if you do no agree with the amount of time spent or the what happens if instructions were not followed and time was wrongly spent. These are the basic questions you should ask yourself and the VA.
It is highly recommended to assign timescales to eash task you assign. If you know a project will take more than 20/30 hours then make sure you get an update every 5 hours and see how it is progressing. It is advisable to extend a heavy task on a 4 hour daily basis, research has proven that VAs perform better on a single task if they work shorter hours a day on that particular project. There is no point expecting a project that needs 30 hours done in 2 days, you cannot expect quality work like this.
Training Your VA
Using outsourcing or VA service has been very beneficial to me and I learned by mistakes. I am just giving some tips so that you can make good use of your money and be a happy outsourcer. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me on rajeevkistoo@gmail.com or if you do not want to waste your time on elance.com looking for a VA company, get in touch with me on rajeev.kistoo for a free consultation.
All the best and be Happy
ps: You can get in touch with me through http://www.rajeevkistoo.com
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