Can a Virtual Assistant Contribute to The Success of Your Beauty Salon?

There is plenty of buzz around about how a virtual assistant (VA) can help businesses. VAs have certainly proved their worth to companies that conduct some or all of their activity online. However, what about more traditional businesses such as a beauty salon? Can a virtual assistant help contribute to their success too?
This article aims to demonstrate to you just how a beauty salon can benefit from using a VA.

Here are just a few things that a VA can contribute:

1. Appointment Management

Managing your appointments is essential to the smooth running of your beauty salon business. However, it can be not easy at times, especially if you are fully booked, and you need to treat clients while rearranging clients and staff. Having someone doing this important task for you does not mean that you have to employ a new member of staff; you can outsource this job to a VA.

2. Completing Administrative Tasks

There are so many things to do around your business that you often get dragged away from the important stuff - dealing with your clients. A VA can take on your business' administrative burdens so that you can entirely focus on providing a top-quality beauty service.
Think about what administrative tasks take up most of your time, or that you have difficulty doing or don’t enjoy. Financial or mathematics-based administration is a good example. You could send your information off to a VA in a spreadsheet, and they can do the calculations, formatting, or whatever else is required.

3. Website & Social Media Management

Managing your online profiles is a full-time job in itself. So, if you are trying to run a successful beauty salon business, you are going to need some help on this front. This job is an ideal task for a virtual assistant, as their very presence relies on being online, so they are used to this type of work. Creating posts, blogs, and optimizing your website to get it on potential customers' screens are invaluable tasks your VA can do for you.

4. Copywriting

As far as search engines are concerned, the copy is king. If your website and online profiles are identical to every other beauty salon in your area, then chances are you are not going to be picked up by search engines as much as you could be. A VA can write unique and quality content for you, ensuring that your website stands out to web crawlers and actual customers.

5. Chatting with Clients

Regardless of how much effort you put into your Help page or your FAQs, customers generally prefer to speak with an actual person. Having a VA answer your customers’ queries in real-time will go a long way to setting your beauty salon business apart.

Conclusion

These are just a handful of the ways that a Beauty Salon VA can contribute to your beauty salon business. Hopefully, they will have opened your mind to other ways to benefit from this virtual help.

10 Top Questions To Ask Your Potential Virtual Assistant During An Interview

Before you employ your new virtual assistant (VA), you should first conduct an interview. As with any other potential employee, a preliminary interview will let you know if your potential VA is suitable.

You must ask your potential VA the right questions during this interview. Here are ten of the top questions to consider asking them.

1. Why do you enjoy being a VA?

This question not only gives you an insight into the person's motivation, but it can also lead to a host of other interesting aspects of your prospective VA.

2. What are your top skills?

Knowing that your VA possesses the required skills for the job. For instance, if you need them to produce visual marketing materials, graphic design skills would be essential.

3. How proficient are you with software ABC?

If your business relies on a particular software, you'll need to make sure your VA is proficient in its use. For instance, they may be a wizard in one type of accounting software, but not your business's program.

4. Tell me your strengths and weaknesses?

Your potential VA's response to this question will inform you about their capabilities. A competent VA will understand their weaknesses as much as knowing their strengths. Beware of someone who thinks they have no weaknesses.

5. What hours can you work?

Being virtual means that your VA can work from anywhere. However, being in a different timezone can create issues over working hours. They need to be available to meet your requirements.

6. How do you communicate with a difficult client?

There will be times when you and your VA have a miscommunication or misunderstanding. How they can deal with these situations is critical to your working relationship.

7. What is your response time?

If you are going to be setting your VA any priority work other than routine tasks, you should first know how quickly they can respond. Otherwise, you could be disappointed with what you consider a slow response.

8. What is your back-up plan to your computer crashing in the middle of a job?

It rarely happens, but you can bet your IT will fail in the middle of an essential job when it does. You need to be confident that your VA has a suitable back-up plan.

9. What references can you provide?

Don't merely rely on online reviews or testimonials - often, these can be fabricated. Your potential VA should be happy to provide you with contact details from previous employers to contact them directly.

10. What interests you most about being a VA?

The answers to this question will help you gauge the applicant's motivation for the job. Do they want to be a VA, or is some other reason?

Conclusion

You may be employing a virtual assistant, but that is no excuse for not putting them through a provisional interview. Hopefully, these ten top questions to ask your potential virtual assistant during an interview will help your selection process.

7 Ways A Call Answering Service Can Help Small Businesses

When your business is thriving, things can get quite busy at times. Answering phone calls can often distract you from other important aspects of your business.

Of course, the phones need to be answered, so one solution is to use a telephone answering service. Here are seven benefits to your business by using a call answering service.

1. Boost Productivity

Answering phone calls can be a huge distraction. This distraction is not only for the person receiving the call but also for those nearby the call. Distractions reduce staff productivity, and even after the call has ended, it may take some time to get back into their work.

A call answering service can remove this distraction, freeing staff to concentrate on what they need to. The result is a boost in productivity.

2. Reduce Staff Costs

Maybe you have already considered hiring someone to take on the burden of answering calls. A receptionist will certainly allow other staff to concentrate on their jobs. However, they will come with a hefty financial cost. If you are hiring them merely to answer calls, you will undoubtedly find a call answering service to be more cost-effective than a staff member.

3. Eliminates Training Costs

A new member of staff will rarely hit the ground running. You will likely need to spend time and resources training them before they become effective in their role. This training takes up not only their time but also that of a mentoring staff member. A call answering service needs no training or mentoring and is ready to go immediately.

4. Take Calls While You Sleep

You may not be able to have your business open 24/7, but with a call answering service, your customers can speak to someone every minute of every day. Think about how that might boost your sales?

5. Increase Customer Faith

Having an actual person answering your calls all hours of the day means that your customers will have more faith in your reliability and customer service. Even merely to hold a conversation over to the following morning, your customers will appreciate the human interaction dealing with their queries.

6. Manage Surges in Business

A sudden surge in business might be great for sales, but it can also lead to orders being missed or queries not being answered. If you use a call answering service, you will be able to manage surges, making sure that no customer gets forgotten about

7. Schedule Management

Missing a planned appointment is not only unprofessional; it can lead to missed opportunities. A call answering service can also help you manage your busy schedule, calling you with reminders of pending meetings and appointments.

Conclusion

For any business, answering the phone is something that you must do, and do it right every time. These seven ways a call answering service can help your small business be more efficient, increase your productivity, and ultimately improve your bottom line.

15 Tasks That Photographers and Videographers Can Outsource To Virtual Assistants

As a photographer or videographer, your time is precious, and every minute you are not behind your camera is a minute wasted.

Here are fifteen tasks that photographers and videographers can outsource to virtual assistants to maximize your shooting time.

1. Basic Photo and Video Editing

The final edit of your photos or videos may be something that you want to complete yourself. However, virtual assistants can provide you with basic editing skills that can save you a load of time and effort.

2. Adding Watermarks

If you're considering putting your images on the web, you'll need to make sure that the samples have a watermark. Otherwise, they're bound to be copied and used somewhere without your permission. Adding a watermark to your images is simple, but it's a time-consuming job. This task is ideal for a Photographer VA.

3. Updating Galleries

Putting your thousands of photos or videos online is probably something you've been telling yourself you'll get around to eventually. Employ a VA to do this, and you soon have an extensive online gallery.

4. Assist With Creating Photography or Videography Courses

Teaching your photography or videography skills is a big money-spinner. A VA can help you with the considerable amount of administration it takes to develop such a course.

5. Creating Lead Magnets For Courses and Other Income Sources

Once you've got your photography or videography course developed, you'll need to market it. This task is another time-consuming one that is ideal for a VA.

6. Tagging Photos on Social Media

Merely having your beautiful photos or videos posted on social media is not enough to get them noticed. Your VA can set about tagging these correctly so that they start to receive a considerable amount of views.

7. Adding Descriptions to Photos and Videos on Websites

Having good descriptions and names for the photos and videos posted on your website will help search engines pick them up quicker. Your VA can do this, freeing you from a time-consuming task.

8. SEO Your Website

While they're at the previous task, you might as well get your VA to SEO your entire website. Let's face it; you're never going to get around to that!

9. Loading Videos to YouTube or Other Video Hosting Platforms

Sitting in front of your screen, watching the progress of a massive video file uploading to YouTube isn't the best use of any videographer's time. This job is definitely one for your VA.

10. Organise Your Photo/Video Library

A VA can organise your filing system, making it easier to search and filter for photos and videos by topic, date, mood, etc.

11. Social Media Management

Getting your photos and videos onto social media is one thing, but this means of marketing needs to be managed. A VA can take this monumental task off your shoulders.

12. Blogging About Your Photos or Videos

Posting your work with a supporting blog is more likely to generate interest than the image/video on its own. Your VA can create regular blogs about your work.

13. Marketing Your Photos, Videos, and Courses

With all your photos, videos, snd training courses squared away, you'll need someone to market your material. Your VA is the perfect choice for this task.

14. Processing and Delivering Online Orders of Photos/Videos/Courses

Any sales you make from your courses, photos, or videos can be processed by your VA.

15. Dealing with Online Customer Service Issues

And, of course, your VA can deal with any issues arising from your online sales.

So, now is the time to get your virtual assistant working for you, to free you for the more important aspects of your photography or videography business.