Virtual assistants are no longer confined to personal use. With growing innovation and technology, virtual assistants are now making their way to large-scale business implementations. The rise of artificial intelligence has driven the technology as it leaps from serving individual users through simple voice-based inputs to serve companies and businesses in a variety of use cases.
With a growing business, the need for more resources also increases. Companies are now implementing AI-powered virtual assistants to serve them in various. This technology can be especially helpful to SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) because virtual assistants can serve as an extra pair of helping hands for the burgeoning companies.
SMBs can be highly benefitted by virtual assistants as they can help companies grow while letting their employees focus on organizational core pursuits. A virtual assistant today can be treated as an individual that can take care of and handle various crucial aspects in several areas such as customer support, social media, HR, operations, communications, and marketing. Moreover, a virtual assistant can perform these tasks with high precision and effectiveness, saving a lot of human capital.
Ease of use
Virtual assistants are easy to set up and use. Moreover, the process can save a company from the hassle of hiring permanent employees as the business grows. If your company is not ready to hire more permanent employees but needs resources to deal with support and operations, a virtual assistant can get the work done.
There are several virtual assistant services providers such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, which supplies specialized virtual assistants to suit various company and business needs. Just like the cloud, virtual assistant services are also charged based on usage, making it transparent and cost-effective. Service providers offer pay-per-use and pay-per-device policies, making it ideal for companies of all shapes and sizes.
Helps to scale-up business
Companies that have an increasing work volume and decreasing turnaround time are in the position where they must scale-up the business. However, the process of scaling-up might involve additional resources including more employees to accommodate the increasing need and volume of work.
Unfortunately, for most small and medium-sized companies, the process of hiring a permanent employee can be very costly. Virtual assistants, on the other hand, can help companies handle the increased work volume while keeping the costs associated with that in check.
Since virtual assistants are virtual, they can be assigned to work whenever there is a business need. Companies don’t have to deal with training employees as the virtual assistants come pre-trained. On top of everything, virtual assistants do the work with higher efficiency while yielding productive results.
Helps to realign the company budget
The most common and primary reason for companies opting for a virtual assistant is to save business costs. Hiring and deploying a virtual assistant is much easier and cost-effective compared to hiring a permanent or contract-based employee. Companies can save a lot of infrastructure costs along with operational costs when using virtual assistants. It is estimated that companies using virtual assistants save as much as 40 percent on their business expenses.
All the money saved using a virtual assistant can be reassigned to other essential aspects such as security, business analysis, and infrastructure upgrades.
Organizational tasks
Every company spends a lot of time and effort on various organizational tasks such as meeting planning, arranging conferences, and appointments. Hiring people to perform these mundane tasks could possibly be a funds-eater. Virtual assistants are the ideal human replacement in these kinds of organizational tasks.
Content and email marketing
Digital marketing and content are critical for businesses to develop their brand value and reputation — and, of course, sales. However, it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to create and manage value-added content. A company can hire or sign up for a virtual assistant service that can handle the content, help the company develop sales-oriented content, and manage regular blog posts.
For every company, mailing lists and having a user engagement strategy are crucial for business development. A virtual assistant-powered service can perform these mailing activities and email marketing by using machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to provide the right content to the right audience for better user engagement.
Virtual assistants can also do online research and help organizations and companies focus on the right keywords to gain customer attention.
Customer support
It is a misconception that virtual assistants can only answer calls and respond through texts or emails. Virtual assistants these days offer a variety of services on top of providing reliable and efficient customer support. While human assistance might still be needed in a few critical escalations in the customer support domain, virtual assistants can easily take over the redundant tasks in customer service to serve customers better and efficiently.
By employing virtual assistants in customer support, organizations can free up an actual employee to do something better. Moreover, virtual assistants, unlike humans, can avoid all forms of mistakes and errors and can spot more areas of opportunities.
Virtual assistants: Helping hands at a decent cost
Almost all companies, especially small and medium-sized businesses, will at some point need reliable support while not being able to hire employees on a permanent or contract basis. Virtual assistants can help businesses grow while keeping costs in check. Virtual assistants are just-in-time on-demand resources, which you should try. Try implementing them in few areas first, monitor, learn, reconfigure, and get the most out of these virtual assistants. Hiring a virtual assistant service can foster growth and improve productivity.
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