Last Updated on September 1, 2023 by David
Guest Post for Re:amaze by Anja Jeftovic of LTVplus. LTVplus is a leading provider in virtual assistants for online businesses.
Scaling your business processes with in-house personnel can prove challenging — especially when it comes to customer service. Every e-commerce business strives to deliver 24/7 coverage to help customers at any time of the day, but not every employee is willing to work late night shifts as they prefer time off with their families and personal lives.
How can we then fill this gap of providing 24/7 coverage without affecting employee morale?
The solution: hiring Virtual Assistants.
Find remote Virtual Assistants based in other parts of the world who could work the late hour shifts during their daytime. This way, your customer service does not get affected due to the late hours, and your business can provide 24/7 coverage successfully.
A Virtual Assistant can also offload repetitive tasks to free up your customer service team to focus on higher value activities.
1. What is a Virtual Assistant (VA)?
2. Customer service tasks to delegate to a Virtual Assistant
3. Where to find a Virtual Assistant?
4. How to qualify a Virtual Assistant for Customer Service?
5. Hiring a Virtual Assistant to help your customers
1. What is a Virtual Assistant (VA)?
Virtual Assistants (VAs) are remote contractors that you can hire to handle specific tasks and take on assigned duties. They exist to offload repetitive tasks to give businesses headroom for strategy.
They come with a variety of skills so depending on your requirements, they can tackle different tasks such as data entry, providing email support, and being on live chat answering real-time inquiries. You can pretty much find a virtual assistant in any niche as long as you look hard enough.
2. Customer service tasks to delegate to a Virtual Assistant
When it comes to customer service, these are the tasks that you can delegate to a Virtual Assistant to provide 24/7 coverage and free your customer service team up to tackle bigger tasks:
- Reply to live chat sales and support inquiries
- Resolve tickets while your customer service team is asleep
- Mediate returns and refunds and processing them when really needed
- Replying on social media when the other half of the world is awake
- Making sure all customer service conversations have been properly tagged for data reporting
3. Where to find a Virtual Assistant?
There are a few ways to find VAs for your needs.
- Word-of-mouth
Your employees or customers may know people who fit the requirements you have. - Facebook groups
Depending on the country that you’re looking at, simply search Facebook for groups where you can post jobs and source for talent. - Outsourcing companies
There are talent companies in the market (such as LTVplus and TaskDrive) that can take care of the tasks for you. They can also hire VAs on your behalf so you don’t have to spend too much time on recruitment. - Job boards
Our popular favorite. With so many job boards for each country in the world, you can easily source for many candidates to get started.
Here are some of the popular job boards that businesses use to find live chat agents or customer service representatives:
- OnlineJobs.ph
Find Virtual Assistants based in the Philippines. - Jobrack
Get candidates based in Eastern Europe.
They also offer additional hiring services to get high-quality candidates faster. - RemoteOK.io
Source for candidates all across the world with a popular digital nomad resource for remote jobs. - LinkedIn
A great place to proactively contact suitable candidates with job opportunities. - DOU.ua
Look for Ukraine-based customer service staff who are skilled in both tech support and customer service.
4. How to qualify a Virtual Assistant for Customer Service?
When hiring a Virtual Assistant for customer service, you need to consider a few factors:
- What skills should the VA have?
- What languages should the VA be fluent in?
- What responsibilities will the VA take on?
- Do you need the VA full-time or part-time?
- How long do you need the VA for?
Once you’ve taken those factors into account, you can use them to filter candidates very quickly.
Aside from credentials and experience, there are a few tests you can conduct during the interview process to make sure you have the best VA for the job.
- Typing speed test
If you’re looking for a live chat agent, you need someone who can type fast. Faster response times have been proven to increase customer satisfaction and get you more sales. - Test a live chat agent during your actual interview.
- Get the agent to share his or her screen after loading up the typing speed test on-screen.
- You are looking for someone who can type at least 50 words-per-minute (WPM) to make sure he or she can respond fast enough to make customers happy.
- Language test
Prepare a language to test the language proficiency of the Virtual Assistant. You want to make sure the VA is able to converse freely in the language you need support for. - Live chat mock test
This is a really good one to test live chat agent candidates. - Have your candidates review a website and learn the material prior to the interview.
- During the interview (assuming it’s online), turn off both the video and audio streams and have them chat with you via the chat interface.
- Roleplay as a visitor to the given website and your candidate plays the live chat agent who responds to your inquiries.
The goal here is to see how your candidate reacts to the scenarios played out. It is OK if your candidate does not have the full knowledge of the products involved due to the short timespan.
With the factors considered and tests carried, you will definitely be able to qualify high-quality VAs to serve your customers well.
5. Hiring Virtual Assistants to create a better customer experience
Now that you know how to find and quality your own team of Virtual Assistants for customer service, make sure to prepare an onboarding process that gets them integrated with your business processes very quickly. You want to reduce the ramp-up time as much as possible.
If you’re looking for dedicated VAs instead who can take on customer service for you, you can also consider hiring live chat agents from LTVplus as they are all 100% dedicated to the client they work with.
Start building your team of VAs today and create a better customer experience for your customers.
About Re:amaze
Re:amaze is a modern helpdesk and customer messaging platform designed to help eCommerce businesses boost customer happiness and revenue. Re:amaze allows all customer-oriented teams to work together in a shared inbox through email, social, SMS, voice, and live chat. Re:amaze also comes packaged with automated messaging and chatbots so eCommerce brands can succeed at the front lines of conversational commerce.