Communication Tools for Virtual Assistants...

When you setup your virtual assistance business, navigating through the world of possible services can be time consuming, overwhelming and frustrating. There are endless options and sometimes, we can run the risk of adding way too many services to our companies. When we do this, we pay excess fees and we end up with things we may never use.

Over the next few blog posts, we’re going to explore some of the services that I feel are the most vital for virtual assistants to have in place and why.

Communication Tools

The next area that I want to look at is communication. Communication tools are vital for a virtual assistant’s business because of the nature of how we work. Working virtually means that we lose out on the face-to-face opportunities that are present in the real world. To get around this, we need to have open lines of communication with our clients.

As we mentioned in our discussion on project management tools, a lot of our communication goes through Basecamp or Web Collaboration. However, not all of our clients like working through these tools and some prefer to have a more direct line to our team.

Skype becomes one of our most direct connections to our clients. With Skype, you have the ability to do computer-based telephone calls but more importantly, you can instant message through the tool. Not all of our clients are on Skype and not all of our clients use it to message us but for those that do open up that line of communication, it becomes a valuable tool.

Using Skype though means setting some ground rules with your clients. For example, I don’t pick up Skype telephone calls unless they are scheduled into my calendar. I also won’t allow our clients to delegate items to me via Skype.

The way that I explain to them that they should use Skype is to get quick answers or do quick check-ins. For example, “Where are we at with the sales page for the upcoming telesummit?” or “I sent over a fax, did you receive it?” Quick check-ins like these alleviates the stress that your client may face when sending things off into the black hole that is the Internet.

Aside from Skype, Twitter has become an awesome tool in opening up the lines of communication for our clients. Twitter allows our clients to do the same thing that they would do on Skype – quickly check-in. It also allows them to see what I am up to as a member of their team. If I am Tweeting about going to lunch or checking out early, they are made aware of that as well.

As with Skype, you want to set some ground rules here too. For example, you don’t want your clients getting into the habit of direct messaging you items they need done. All of your delegation should happen in one place. For us it is Basecamp / Web Collaboration but for you it could be another place or another tool.

If there is a tool that you would like us to explore, I’d love to hear from you. I’d also love to know which tools you are most curious about or where you feel there are gaps in your business. Leave your questions on our Formspring account!

Using Skype in Your Virtual Assistance Practice...

If you’ve been on a computer for any length of time, you’ve no doubt heard about Skype.  It’s an amazing communication tool that uses the Internet as its platform for everything – voice, video chat and regular chat (amongst other features).  One of the ways that we have started using Skype in our virtual assistance practice is through the use of conference-style conversations.

I’m not just talking about the regular instant messaging back and forth here… I’m talking about setting up your Skype experience to be a strategic place for discussion and conversation.  This is particularly helpful if you have a virtual assistant team that works with you on client work or if you pull an outside resource to assist on a project.

In our business, we have multiple projects (aka clients) and multiple team members.  Since we put together “power teams” for every client, sometimes the same team members are not always involved in the same conversations.  So, we create conference style chats and label them with an appropriate title to make conversations easier.

To illustrate this better, here is a screenshot of a sample conversation:

As you can see, we have the group conversations down the left-hand side in the “drawer” part and on the right, the actual conversation.  This conversation includes my friend Josh Schnell from Macgasm.net and as promised in the chat above, I’m adding a link to his site.  It also includes Trina Lamarche, one of our BSETC team members.

Any group conversation can have a topic added to it and you can add any number of people to the conversation.  The beauty is that you can then have organized, focused conversations around specific clients or, you can add your client and have a group chat that is setup specifically for them to post questions into.

The other thing that is nice about group conversations is that you can choose when you want to be notified about new messages.  Sometimes, group chat will not always pertain to you so you may want to set a filter that I often set.  Generally speaking, I’ll set it so that I am only notified if / when someone uses my name.  To do that, I right-click on the chat topic in the drawer part and choose “Notify me only if these words are mentioned:” and then I’ll add my name here.

Begin setting up group conversations for yourself and your clients to make tracking those convos easier.  We also use it to create an “A-Team” chat where the entire BSETC team chats about whatever we need to / want to.  It creates a sense of community even with all of us being so far apart.