Recently somebody asked me, “What’s it like, in a day of the life of a VA?”, and I thought this would be a great topic, because some people just don’t know what a VA actually does. Obviously, I can only speak from the experience that happens here in the office.
VAs can do a quite a range of different things and if you want to know what sort of things a VA could do, then have a look at my video What is a Virtual Assistant?
Today, though, I’m going to speak to you about what it’s like in the day in the life of a VA.
4 most common tasks that a VA can help you save more of your time in your business:
1. Reception Phones
Basically, what will happen is we’ll come into the office, or my team are currently at home so it’s their home-based offices, and the first thing they’ll do is log into the phone system. Now our phone system covers from 7am to 7pm, currently, but we’re looking to change that to 24 hours at some point when we get enough workload from clients. The day shift will come in and they will log into their phone system, so they’ll can start getting phone calls from the minute basically, the system starts for the day. We have an arrangement that we set times for our clients. Obviously, in daylight saving time, a lot of our Queensland clients aren’t going to start at seven o’clock, they might start at eight, 8:30 or 9 o’clock. Each client has different times in their system that we have set up for them. The phones only ring at certain times or certain days, if clients only want their phones answered in certain days.
2. Emails
Next the girls might open their email addresses. We have a programme that we use called Shift. This programme allows us to add in all the different email addresses that we would need access to. The beauty of this programme is that if you’re in and out of Google, for example, multiple Gmail or G Suite accounts, then what can happen is that once you log into one email account, it’ll log you out of another Gmail account, which is not great when you’re flicking in and out of email accounts all the time. Shift will allow you to be logged into all the different email accounts at the same time, though primarily, shift only uses Google and Outlook, you can get access to other emails by setting up different websites within Shift. We don’t use it that way.
The girls might then go through and check the email addresses and check the email accounts and they’ll see what’s coming in for that time. They will basically work on answering some emails or making some appointments or rescheduling appointments and things like that.
3.Messages
After this they might go in and check our Slack chat channel. We’ve got probably about half of our clients are on a Slack channel, we might have messages our clients might have put in, can you reschedule this appointment or I’m running late in traffic, can you tell the person I’m going to be late, or it might be really late, so they have to be rescheduled, sort of what everything goes for messages. I guess at the beginning of the morning, the tasks that have to be done are quite reactive. They’re things that have come up overnight or early in that morning that need to be done to keep the day sort of moving along.
4.Admin
Next the team might do some invoicing. Some Invoicing is done before the appointments start for the day and then the rebates are done in that afternoon. Other invoices are done the next day after those appointments have been held, or they’ve been done at the end of the day. Depending on what sort of client they’re looking after, and what the client’s needs are is really where their workload goes. Obviously, throughout the day, they’re answering calls, and they’re addressing the work that comes with those which is mainly appointment booking or following things up or leaving messages for our practitioners or our clients.
5.Additional tasks
That’s generally the day and then if they’ve got time, they’ll do other administration things, or they might set up some processes for clients just to make things run more smoothly. If they have a client that has come down with COVID, particularly at this time, or they’re sick with something or their kids have had to be picked up from school or something like that, that they might have to evolve their day with rescheduling days of appointments because of things happening. It really is like we can be proactive to a certain degree, and we generally know all of our clients, know on a day-to-day basis that we’re looking after them quite regularly.
The girls in the team know what is coming in, and they know what to expect from a day-to-day basis on a general consensus. There are regular things in their day like invoicing or rebates, or the follow up of referrals and things like that. On the financial planning side, it might be the follow up of applications etc. The team know the roles that they’re in, and they know what needs to be done for each client and the things that need to be done on certain days.
So, a day in the life of a VA, it can be very different day in day out. It’s not necessarily something that is very rigid and very much the same every single day. We always say to people that we interview that it’s never going to be a boring life being a VA, because it’s very interesting with all the different things that you have to do, you get a phone call, which might be completely different to what you might have done yesterday. We really can’t pinpoint what we’ve done in the life of VA, but that’s a general idea on how it is to be a VA.
If you’re interested in using a VA for your business, please click on the link below and book in a time with us so we can have a chat to you on how VA might help your business. If we can’t help you, if we don’t have the skill set to help you, then we can point you in the direction to find someone that can help you.
Click on the link below to book in a session now.
https://calendly.com/bossladycoach/15min
Also read: 4 WAYS A BUSINESS COACH CAN HELP YOU WITH IN YOUR BUSINESS
