Customer Support Virtual Assistant

Customer support is an essential aspect of any business whether it’s business-to-consumer (B2B) or business-to-business (B2B). By prioritizing customer care and ensuring that customers get the help they need when they need it, businesses can boost their customer retention rate and encourage word-of-mouth referrals.

A customer support virtual assistant (VA) is a remote worker or remote contractor that can handle a wide range of customer service tasks for businesses. These tasks include answering questions from current or potential customers, answering phone calls, responding to chat messages, answering customer support tickets, and so on.

The only difference between an office-based customer support agent and a customer support VA is that VAs complete all their assigned tasks remotely. However, in terms of skill, experience, and performance, they are quite comparable.

Customer support VAs are essential for any customer-centric business that aims to provide round-the-clock, reliable, and efficient support services without having to rely on the expensive local labor market.

Hiring a virtual assistant to work as a remote customer service representative gives startups and small businesses the opportunity to scale their support services and keep their customers happy with any budget. This is because it’s very easy to get part-time or seasonal customer support VAs so you can adjust your support team’s size fluidly.

Aside from team flexibility, using offshore virtual support services help you cut down on the usual operating costs (office rent or seat lease, equipment, insurance, etc.) and pay less for labor — both solid cost-reduction tactics for growing your business.

Here are some of the tasks that you can assign to a customer support VA.

Phone Support

Some customer support VAs are skilled at providing voice support through VoIP or online calling platforms. With access to better software, some VAs can even do video customer support.

Live Chat Support

Although phone support is still preferred by many customers, more and more are choosing live chat to get assistance from businesses. Messaging bots can only do so much, so it’s important to have real people ready to provide live chat support to your customers.

Email Support

Email might be slower compared to phone or live chat support, but some customers still value being able to deal with messages at their own pace. For this reason, it’s ideal to have an email support VA too.

Develop FAQs

Because your VA will be dealing with a lot of customer queries and feedback, they will be well equipped to draft frequently asked questions to add to your business website.

Proactive Customer Support

Customer support doesn’t just mean waiting around for customers to send you their questions. Your VA can also actively seek out or engage customers who seem to be having a hard time deciding on a purchase or choosing a service.

Feedback Collection

Customer support VAs can handle your feedback collection initiatives too. They can send out email campaigns or set up feedback surveys to do so.

Feedback Monitoring

Customer support VAs can track, monitor, and respond to feedback from review sites, social media, and other feedback collection platforms.

In order to hire the best virtual customer service assistant, you need to look for certain soft skills or personality traits in your applicants. Here are some of them.

• Excellent People Skills
  Because dealing with people is at the core of customer support, it’s essential for a customer service VA to be great at handling people with different moods and levels of frustration. They need to be able to read people well, they need to be great listeners, and they need to be attentive.
• Great Communication Skills
  Communication is a difficult skill to master. It’s not just about ensuring that they’ve got a good grasp of the English language, they should be able to communicate in a concise, clear manner that leaves little to no room for misunderstandings.
• Patience and Composure
  Customers get frustrated; that is inevitable. That’s why it’s crucial that the VA you hire has patience and composure in spades. They need to be able to talk in a positive manner and diffuse heated situations before it becomes unsalvageable.
• Resourcefulness and Quick Thinking
  Because situations can be unpredictable, especially on phone calls and live chat, your VA needs to be resourceful and quick-footed when it comes to finding solutions to the customer’s problems.

Now that you know the skills you need to look for in a customer support VA, it’s time to get started on the hiring process. Before you hire, prepare a list of the tasks you need the VA to do and the tools that you want them to have knowledge of. Also list down any skill, language, or schedule requirements you have. This will help you craft an accurate job description that is crucial for culling down potential candidates.

As with any other virtual assistant, it’s always easier to hire from a trusted virtual assistant business such as 20four7VA. With 20four7VA, you can get matched to screened, vetted, and trained customer support virtual assistants — free of cost. 20four7VA has a unique skill-matching and hiring process that allows a business owner to get hiring and onboarding assistance for free. The only thing you need to do is schedule a consultation call and tell us what you need.