To create a high quality work virtual assistance needs to put in more hours and pay attention to details. This becomes difficult with various other tasks and clients to manage at the same time. Organizations often hire various virtual assistants to manage their work at scale. The CRM systems can be used to centralize the discussion process between divisions effectively and efficiently.

What is a virtual assistant?

A virtual assistant is a self-employed worker or a freelancer or an individual person working on contract, who offers administrative, marketing, or business tasks so that you can outsource some tasks and focus more valuable time on other business activities. The tasks that they are involved in can be few tasks per month or tasks that need more involvement. Virtual assistants may be experts in their specific field or certain types of tasks. You can hire a virtual assistant from anywhere provided their schedule and availability matches with your needs.

Why should you hire a virtual assistant?

Many times a virtual assistant can save both time and money. Hiring a virtual assistant can free up your time so that you can perform day-to-day business activities. Here are some benefits of hiring a virtual assistance:

• You can hire from a larger pool of people: As a virtual assistant can work from a remote location this makes it easy for the employer to hire from a greater pool of talent which is not restricted by their geographical location.
• It is cost effective: As you can hire a virtual assistant on hourly basis it can reduce the cost of hiring. The need to provide for the infrastructure is also reduced significantly. Therefore hiring a virtual assistant can be cost effective.
• Hiring multiple assistance: You can hire multiple virtual assistants at the same time to scale up your business process. This can help you with always having someone to do the job.

What does a virtual assistant (VA) do?

A virtual assistant can perform a varied range of tasks, but the focus of their job revolves around administrative and maintenance jobs that do not need a deeper understanding of the business. Below is the list of the things a virtual assistant can do for your business:

• Perform a search online
• Manage your email inbox.
• Observe a calendar.
• Plan and manage the postings you make on social media.
• Provide IT support
• Execute administrative tasks
• Assistance with customer service
• Carry out a marketing analysis

There are various virtual tools available online that can help virtual assistants manage tasks like graphic designing, managing appointments, communicating with clients, or generating sales leads. The user interface of these tools is simple and user friendly. Some of the tools onboarding and registration are so quick and easy that you can start using them within a few minutes.

Cold Emailing

1. Woodpecker – Woodpecker is a product which is tailored to your cold emailing and lead generation needs. Woodpecker makes cold emailing intuitive, send and follow up from your mailbox, automatically builds the sender reputation and more.
2. Sendinblue –  Sendinblue focuses its services on providing a more comprehensive and complete intuitive solution to email marketing. Other services that it offers alongside email marketing are SMS marketing, Chat, Inbox management, CRM and transactional email to its subscribers.
3. SendBuzz – SendBuzz is a sales engagement platform that helps sales reps and marketers at various stages of sales engagement. Cold email outreach is one such service that it offers alongside increasing email deliverability, smart sequencing, spam production and more.

Team Work

1. Google workspace – Using Google workspace has one advantage i.e due its popularity many people know it and how to use it. It’s designed for teams of all sizes and is a flexible and innovative solution for collaborating on different projects.
2. Zoho one – Are you sick and tired of wasting your time and energy on complicated, fragmented solutions to operate your business? Your unified suite’s operating system for business, Zoho One, ensures that your company processes will go off without a hitch. You simply concentrate on what is most important: your goals.
3. Scribe – With scribe you can get a free tool for instantly documenting your processes for any reason. It has a feature where you can record clicks and keystrokes and instantly turn them into a guide with screenshots and written instructions. You can share a scribe via link or embedded in a CMS, wiki, knowledge base, or other tool.

Prospecting tools

1. LeadCRM – Data entry and finding new leads might become a cumbersome task, plus create bottlenecks for a VA’s performance. Thus, to scale up the process, would eat up a lot of time. LeadCRM’s browser extension helps you automate the entire process with one-click. All you need to do is, just integrate your CRM and press a button, the contact details will get synced.
2. Lusha – Lusha is also a famous LinkedIn prospecting tool that helps organizations collect important contact information from LinkedIn prospects. Similar to LeadCRM, Lusha also helps you do data enrichment and give two-way sync for data integrations.
   

Online Meetings

1. Zoom – With this cloud-based video conferencing tool it is easy to hold video conferences and collaborate from home. With the free version you have the freedom to schedule  and organize video calls up to 40 minutes.Here remote assistance can also share their screen with clients to collaborate on a specific project or showcase their work.
2. Google Meet – With google meet you can have a secure video conferencing at no cost. You can schedule an immediate meeting within a few minutes or set up calls for later. You can send a Google Calendar invite to every participant, share the agenda of the meeting and confirm their presence as well.
3. Appointly – Appointly has an easy-to-use interface clients can view your real time availability in their timezone, and book appointments 24×7. They can conveniently manage the meeting by rescheduling and canceling them on their own. With all these features there are add-ons like you can send automated SMS/email reminders, integrate with your personal and professional calendar, set virtual meetings using Zoom.

Connecting and Interaction 

1. Slack – One of the preferred means of communication among teams in small businesses and start-ups. Slack is designed as an alternative to email and has approx 750,000 active clients. Channels are one of the best features of slack. 
2. Flock – Flock has some of the awesome messaging features that are a good fit for communication and collaborating with clients on different projects. Send voice notes, create-to-do lists, and also set reminders for tasks with flock.

Social Media Management

1. Hootsuite – With hootsuite automatically schedule your post at the best time and analyze the top-performing content with personalized insights. Monitor all the hashtags, trends, and brand mentions through the customized dashboard of Hootsuite.
2. Buffer – An intuitive and affordable platform to manage all your social media profiles from one place and share content you can create across them. Buffer makes team collaboration, scheduling and engagement faster and easy with its tools which makes it indispensable for any virtual assistance.
3. Post Planner – Postplanner’s automatically scheduling and delivery post feature ensures that your posts are posted at the best time and spamming your followers. It displays your content across various platforms and it is popular with 2000,000+ businesses for their social media management.
4. Hopper HQ – With simple and easy access to several social media tools at once, and team collaboration makes HopperHQ the perfect spot for all business activities around platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more.

Project Management 

1. Trello – One of the best things about Trello is its flexibility in creating and managing teams and the ease with which you can delegate, rotate and shift tasks amongst team members.
2. Asana – With this project management app be in control of your project activities. Look at the bigger picture about the tasks and know whether they are overlapping with others or not. Asana also offers features that allow you to select members for projects where confidentiality needs to be maintained.
3. Basecamp – Basecamp is designed for team work remotely and lets companies organize everything at one place which removes the hustle of going back and forth across various screens. It is available on web, Android , iOS phone and tablets which makes it easy to stay connected and on top of things everytime.
4. Proof Hub – Proofhub gives access to centralized points for all different file sharing platforms. Its ideal features like Proof Hub’s group chat and proofing make it easy to collaborate and synchronize. This SaaS solution helps you save time, money and resources by streamlining workflow processes with many advanced features.

Graphic Designing 

1. Canva – Canva is important to virtual assistance as it is an indispensable tool that will be of their use for a long time. Features like drag and drop editing feature, a vast library of temples, diverse collection of image and graphics makes canva first choice for graphic design.
2. Free logo Creator – Free logo creator is packed with logo designs tools, it is the favorite choice of businesses and individuals. The drag and drop feature and almost thousands of design templates across industries which can be customized for your business and individual needs. 
3. Jumpstory – If you are looking for authentic-looking and high performing stock visuals then Jumpstory is the best choice for you. The AI powered search engine is a time saver as it makes browsing for photos quick and they offer a global insurance on all their content.
4. PicMonkey – PicMonkey has a collection of 9,000+ graphic and textures, 1000s of templates, hundreds of fonts, and easy access to stock images from istock, Getty, Unsplash and Pixabay these features makes it a worthy competitor with the other Graphic Designing.

Conclusion:

Being a virtual assistant is a complex process, where multiple things need to be done to manage a smooth workflow and deliver high quality output. While VAs don’t only work on providing good quality work output, they also have to maintain and manage relationships with their clients at scale.

The interface of most of these tools is easy and would make the work of virtual assistants easier, giving them a competitive edge over their competitors.