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Email Management Virtual Assistant

Improve online business communication with an email management and chat support virtual assistant.

What is Email Support & Chat Support?

These days, people expect instant gratification when it comes to businesses and brands responding to them. That’s why having an email management assistant and live chat support expert is indispensable for a business.

Email support, or email management, refers to the process of addressing customer concerns and requests through email. Email management services can also include following up with customers to close transactions, processing returns or refunds, and general business email correspondence.

Chat support refers to providing customer support through instant messaging apps and platforms. It usually appears in a business’ website as a pop-up form or dialogue box, but many businesses nowadays have also been providing chat support through messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Viber, Whatsapp, and more.

What is an Email Management Virtual Assistant?

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An email management virtual assistant (VA), or email virtual assistant, works remotely to provide your customers with the email support services that they need. Your email VA will be in charge of monitoring your company’s major email channels and making sure that your customers’ questions and concerns are answered efficiently and correctly.

Another task of an email management VA is to monitor which emails are important enough for relevant stakeholders in the company to read and which ones need to be forwarded to other departments or teams. This helps businesses ensure that all email correspondence is dealt with quickly and effectively and that no opportunities, such as partnerships and investments, are buried in the company inbox.

What is a Chat Support Virtual Assistant?

A chat support virtual assistant (VA) is someone who monitors chat support apps and responds to customer concerns and general questions through the chat app. Chat support VAs usually work alone in their homes.

Email and chat support VAs allow you to provide almost instantaneous assistance to your customers, clients, suppliers, or business partners. This helps speed up your business processes and improve your company’s reputation.

What Skills Do Email Management and Chat Support VAs Need to Have?

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To be an effective email management virtual assistant, VAs need to have exceptional reading comprehension and communication skills. They should be able to understand the customer’s emails to make sure that they are providing the correct response.

Aside from these, email support virtual assistants should be able to understand company processes and really learn your business by heart. This is to make sure that they can answer emails fast without checking some form of company documentation every time. This means that they should learn the company and the task requirements at a rapid pace.

Chat support virtual assistants should be excellent multitaskers. In many cases, each chat support VA holds different chat conversations at once, so they must be able to do some research and formulate responses to different customers in different situations.

On top of researching and troubleshooting issues, they have to read notes made by the system and by other support agents about the customer’s support request and account activity. This means that chat support VAs need to read fast and have excellent reading comprehension. This also helps them ask relevant questions back to the customer to provide better assistance. 

Lastly, both email management and chat support VAs need to have great written English communication skills. This doesn’t just mean a good grasp of grammar; it also means the ability to write clear and to-the-point responses. This will help them formulate clear and concise responses to emails and chat messages.

How Do I Hire an Email Virtual Assistant or Chat Virtual Assistant?

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Before hiring a VA, you need to prepare the requirements of the job first. Here are a few guide questions that you need to answer to know the specific type of email management services you need:

  • On average, how many emails are you getting from your customers each day?
  • Are you using any special email tools or email marketing software?
  • How fast do you want your customer’s questions answered? Do you want a 24-hour, 48-hour, or 72-hour turnaround time?
  • How complicated are your company processes?

As for chat support, experience is an important factor to consider. Try to find someone who has held at least one chat support job previously and did it well. Another factor to look at is their typing speed. Chat support VAs need to be able to type quickly and with minimal errors.

When you have the task requirements ready, the next step is to find a reliable virtual staffing company such as 20four7VA and schedule a consultation call. This call will help your VA service provider match you with the best VA for your needs.

Once you have a few VA candidates to choose from, you’re going to have to review their resumes and interview your top picks so that you can get to know them better and find the perfect VA or VAs for the job.

Consider giving your applicants a mock email and chat support task. Be their customer and have them respond to common customer questions. Give them different scenarios and see how well they respond to each one.

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