15 Most Important Skills a Virtual Personal Assistant Must Have

Starting a small business requires an online presence with a digital marketing specialist to help grow the business. As an entrepreneur, you dream of reaching greater heights, huge sales, handling phone calls, emails and maintaining your social media activities. All these can be made easier, thanks to virtual personal assistants.

Hiring a virtual personal assistant provides you with more benefits. However, you need to look out for specific skills. In the digital marketing field, hiring a personal virtual assistant will acclimate your accounts. A virtual personal assistant will be responsible for scheduling relevant posts at regular intervals, respond to customers, and continually engage your audience online.

Below, we take you through the 15 most essential skills a virtual personal assistant must have before hiring one.

1. Management Skills

Management skills are highly required in a Virtual Personal Assistant. Management skills are crucial because of the professionalism needed in handling customers, decision-making, and planning. It benefits your business through the way your virtual administrative assistant solves problems with customers online. It also impacts your business performance and creates opportunities.

2. Highly Reliable.

Reliability is a critical skill every virtual personal assistant must-have. It refers to the consistency of a measure. Reliability is an essential skill because you will be relying on your VPA to report progress, answer emails and phone calls to customers promptly. The skill benefits your business in growth through consistency in performing tasks assigned.

3. Excellent Communication Skills

Most of the work of a VPA entails communication with customers online, such as making phone calls, emailing, and sending messages. This skill is a must because customers need clarity and check on the progress of their task, which requires excellent communication. It may be weekly or daily updates to clients. Communicating well benefits your business through referrals from satisfied clients.

4. Calendar and time management

Calendar and Time management skill helps schedule meetings, appointments, deliveries, and many others. It is essential to look out for this skill before hiring a Virtual personal assistant because it is key to maximizing your day. Any late response and missed appointments with potential clients affect your business growth.

5. Accuracy Skill

Before hiring a VPA, ensure they are accurate and get hired for what they can do best. Accuracy skills are necessary because they provide confidence when dealing with clients, leading to a good job. Accuracy is a skill that provides a high level of paying attention to details and is critically helpful in entering client's data into the business.

6. Proactive Skills

Your VPA also works as your marketing specialist. Proactive skill is vital to your business because they show the VPA's ability to think and take the initiative. Any marketing specialist ought to be proactive to produce quality work and immediately solve issues that arise with clients online.

7. Email Management

Any digital marketing specialist will agree that responding to emails is a huge task. Your VPA also works as your social media assistant who replies to all clients' emails and in time. This skill is crucial because it helps build a solid clientele base by sorting out email marketing lists, adding and removing people, and proofreading emails to clients on your behalf.

8. Honest and Trustworthy skills

The best virtual personal assistants are truthful and honest. Besides, this skill is important for a customer service specialist because they build relationships with your customers. If you are starting a small business, you benefit from an honest VPA who will help your business grow.

9. Multitasking Skills

This skill is among the top critical skills a VPA must possess. The skill is essential to look out for before hiring a VA because they are likely to have more than two tasks to perform at a go and can complete them simultaneously. The skill is beneficial because it creates an effective working environment and saves time.

10. Working Unsupervised

Your Virtual personal assistant is likely to be working remotely. You need to identify if they can work without being monitored. The skill increases your VPA's independence and makes them creative. The skill’s benefit helps in building proper client-customer relationships.

11. Follow-ups

An excellent digital marketing specialist makes follow-ups on customers. This skill is important for your VPA because possessing the know-how to reach out shows the customers that you care even after the sale and effective engagements. It gives your business the benefits of getting feedback from clients. A simple call or email as a reminder will work.

12. Accountability

Most virtual personal assistants get hired by the hour and ought to finish tasks to get paid. Accountability skills are essential to have as a VPA because it eliminates the efforts and time one would spend on distracting activities and instead become accountable for their actions. The skill benefits business productivity.

13. Resourceful skills

Hiring your VPA needs you to identify someone resourceful. They will be required to deal with so many things and issues at once without your help. This skill is important because external circumstances will not influence your VPA in taking action. A resourceful VPA benefits the business by thinking outside the box, generating new ideas to share with customers as needed in digital marketing solutions.

14. Organization skills

A good administrative virtual assistant must be organized. You need to look out for organizational skills in an individual before hiring them because they boost your small business productivity. Other benefits are it helps your VPA prioritize tasks and begin with the most urgent ones, delegate tasks and eliminate those that need to be eliminated.

15. Value Adding skills

Do not just hire someone who waits for you to assign them tasks. Look out for someone who can add value to your small business in your absence. Before hiring your VPA, check if they possess this skill to go out of their way to get clients, anticipate clients' needs, and have working goals. Value-adding skills are critical in your VPA because they increase your business value by their online presence.

Virtual personal assistants are currently promoting business growth, and your small business is no exception. Hiring a VPA that possesses the above 15 essential skills will ultimately help your business become profitable. Even though it can be challenging to find one with the above skills, ensure you stick to the above list and make your hiring process of a VPA easier.