The Complete Guide to Virtual Assistants

How Virtual Assistants Are Changing and Benefiting the Business World

With so many businesses trading online or shifting their operations to the world wide web entirely, virtual assistants are becoming increasingly beneficial. When people think of assistants, they think of employees who schedule appointments, keep track of mail and answer phone calls. However, virtual assistants are much more than just personal assistants. In fact, they’re often experts in niche fields that can save your business a lot of time and money while helping you grow.

In this in-depth guide, we’ll answer the following questions:

What Is a Virtual Assistant?
What Tasks Can a Virtual Assistant Do?
How Can I Trust a Virtual Assistant to Do Their Job?
The Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Assistant
The Drawbacks of Virtual Assistants
Where Can I Find Virtual Assistants?
How Pinnacle X Can Help You

At Pinnacle X, we provide virtual assistants for a broad range of companies operating in Thailand. If you need any advice, want to learn more about virtual assistants, need us to clear up any confusion or would like to book a consultation with our experts, don’t hesitate to give us a call.

What Is a Virtual Assistant?

In short, a virtual assistant, or VA, is basically a person who works for your company but is not physically present at your office. They may handle non-core business tasks on a short or long-term basis. Unlike a member of staff who is employed by your company, a virtual assistant is usually self-employed and works from home or for an agency that specializes in outsourcing.

You can think of a VA as an independent professional that lends creative, technical and administrative expertise to a company. When you hire a VA, you don’t need to pay for their breaks, offer benefits or take responsibility for their taxes, which can save you a great deal of time and money.

What Tasks Can a Virtual Assistant Do?

Regarding what a VA can do for your business in Thailand, there are endless possibilities. They can perform tasks that require niche skills on a short-term basis or carry out duties you don’t need full-time employees for.

Here are just some examples of what a VA can do:

• Data entry
• Update and manage your web content
• Schedule appointments and take calls
• Manage your emails
• Take care of your social media accounts
• Provide translation services
• Research business trends and competitor activity
• Manage your calendar
• Handle travel bookings
• Organize your contacts
• Bookkeeping
• Tax filing
• Legal filing

As you can see from above, a virtual assistant can help your company in countless ways, and they eliminate the need to commit to full-time wages, mitigating risks to your business in the process.

At Pinnacle X, we specialize in virtual assistant services such as administrative support, secretarial tasks, research support, translation, marketing, and writing services, but our capabilities extend far beyond that. Give us a call if you need any useful advice or for a full breakdown of our offering.

How Can I Trust a Virtual Assistant to Do Their Job?

Some business owners, especially those who lack Thai language skills or who have never hired a virtual assistant before, worry that employing a VA could be dangerous. Usually, it’s due to one reason – they can’t keep an eye on their VA like they can on their in-house employees.

Undeniably, it’s true that you can’t usually be physically present to check on your VA, which may lead you to fear they will either fail to meet deadlines or complete their work at all. Also, you may worry that their work will be low quality. Fortunately, you can put those fears aside by choosing our VA services.

At Pinnacle X, we are a team of VAs, meaning we can guarantee high-quality work, completed on time and within budget. We created our business after having worked in the industry for over 20 years. There’s no need to take any risks with freelancers if you work with a team of virtual assistants like ours. If you need trustworthy virtual assistants to help your business grow in Thailand, we’re the company to call.

The Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Assistant

One primary advantage of hiring a virtual assistant is that you get instant support from a skilled professional, and you only need to pay them for the work they do rather than commit to full-time wages. This means that you can save money without having to compromise on the quality of your services and scale your business as and when required.

Virtual assistants simplify your logistical and administrative requirements. Often, VAs are self-employed, meaning they’re responsible for paying their own taxes. We, however, are a dedicated team of virtual assistants. When you outsource tasks to us, you don’t need to worry about sick pay or vacation leave, nor do you need to concern yourself with health insurance or benefits. You’ll either pay a fixed price for a project or agree to an hourly rate for certain tasks that don’t require full-time employees.

Perhaps most importantly for you, our team of Thailand-based virtual assistants can be a huge asset because they speak the local language, can smoothen your business operations and free up countless hours of your valuable time. Imagine how much you could increase your output by hiring our team of VAs to handle many of your tasks. Plus, with Pinnacle X responsible for managing your virtual assistants, you don’t need to familiarise yourself with the local lingo to communicate your needs because we can do it for you.

There are countless more benefits of hiring a virtual assistant, from not having to sacrifice office space for temporary employees to ensure you can access specialist services as and when required.

If you want to learn how virtual assistants can help your business thrive in Thailand, why not book a free, no-obligation consultation with one of our experts? We only ever provide honest and useful advice. We will take the time to get to know your business and explain the ways in which virtual assistants can streamline your operations, mitigate business risks, simplify administration, save you time and money, and much more.

The Drawbacks of Virtual Assistants

Nowadays, thanks to being able to use the internet to communicate with individuals anywhere in the world in real-time, there are very few disadvantages associated with virtual assistants. For the core business process, hiring full-time employees might be your best option. However, for short-term tasks, non-core operations, and specialist input, virtual assistants can be a considerable bonus for your company.

Many people worry about hiring VAs due to the following perceived drawbacks:

• Communication issues

Many business owners think that nothing can beat being able to communicate with an employee face-to-face.

• Language barriers

Some people worry that working with a virtual assistant who doesn’t speak their language could be dangerous for their business.

• Security

You might be worried about giving business data, whether it’s client information or transaction history documents, to somebody you don’t know personally.

Fortunately, you don’t need to worry about any of the issues above if you trust the team of virtual assistants at Pinnacle X. As part of our service and quality guarantees to our clients, we take full responsibility for your VA. All our virtual assistants are contractually bound to protect your IT security and sensitive data. Moreover, we maintain constant communication with our clients using the new era channels of communication, such as Skype, WhatsApp, and Line, together with email and phone.

Where Can I Find Virtual Assistants?

If you want to spend your time and energy of tracking down virtual assistants, there are plenty of online tools you can use, such as:

• Freelancer
• Fast Work
• Codeable (For WordPress related work)
• Upwork
• Craigslist
• Guru

More importantly, searching for virtual assistants based in Thailand can be tricky using such tools. The most straightforward way to find professional, punctual, reliable and trustworthy virtual assistants in Thailand is to let Pinnacle X do the hard work for you. By hiring our team of VAs, you eliminate the headache of having to find and manage a freelancer while mitigating the risks associated with hiring individuals.

How Pinnacle X Can Help You

At Pinnacle X, we are a team of virtual assistants with expertise in a broad range of fields. Moreover, thanks to our extensive network, we specialize in tracking down VAs for all requirements and ensure they’re held accountable for their work. Our job is to help you save time, money and effort so that you can focus on profit and customer-oriented tasks. For any requirement related to outsourcing, you do not need to look any further than Pinnacle X, Thailand’s outsourcing hub.

In addition to virtual assistant services, we specialize in staff outsourcing, recruitment, HR consulting and payroll processing. If you want to find out how we can help your business grow in this Southeast Asian business hub, contact our professionals on (+66) 02 666 4826 to book a free, no-obligation consultation. You can feel confident that your best interests are our top priority.

Credit: picture from Freepik