Establishing procedures for your Virtual Assistant

Set the appropriate course of action 

The goal of a virtual assistant is to be independent. If you spend time every day answering questions about this, or that case - that's not very efficient. In this article we will discuss how to determine, organize and display the procedures that your virtual assistant is required to follow.

In the previous post, we talked about organizing tasks so that everything is clear for your assistant. The person in charge of answering the shop's emails and messages still has to know what to say to your customers! This will come from procedures and templates, the latter which we will talk about in a future blog post. While templates may be extremely helpful, having set procedures is essential to providing consistent service to your customers. These may also be referred to as Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).

Steps to Success

The first step is to determine the procedures. You can do so by answering a simple set of questions - which we have outlined below.

What solution do you offer your customer if: 

• The package was lost
• The product was received damaged
• The package was returned to the sender
• The package is listed as delivered - but customer never received it 
• The customer is not satisfied with product and request a refund
• The customer received the wrong item

To make it easier for your Virtual Assistant - it's also important for them to know

• The approximate shipping delay
• What to do if an order needs to be re-shipped
• What to do if an order needs to be refunded

It's up to you to decide whether or not the Virtual Assistant can proceed with things like refunds/draft orders without seeking your approval first. It is often smart to escalate refund requests at first, until both sides are confident that the procedures that have been set are followed, no matter what the scenario. 

Organizing and sharing your procedures is a bit like choosing a communication platform, there are lots of very good choices. Whether you use a spreadsheet, a classic document or online software, the most important thing is for everything to be clear, detailed and precise. Each potential situation that might occur is listed, followed by well-defined actions to take. 

How to display

You can choose to write out the procedures in a Google sheet, a Word document, a PDF or any other format - as long as they are clear, visible and accessible to your entire team. Airtable.com or draw.io are also both excellent tools for making flow-charts and other creative ways to display how to answer the different scenarios. 

For example, your procedure for handling damaged products might look like this.

Case study: Broken product

A customer sends an email stating that the product they received is damaged.

1. Ask the client to provide pictures
2. Send pictures, case number and summary to fulfillment agent asking for replacement
3. Confirm with customer that free replacement is en route - advise of new shipping delays. 

Clear Communication at all times

In this way, no matter what the issue that comes up, your virtual assistant will know how he/she is expected to manage and what specific solutions they can offer. Of course, there will always be special cases, anomalies, mysteries and questions - that can never be completely avoided. You can make it as easy as possible for your Virtual Assistant to carry out the designated tasks by clearly defining the procedures you want applied. Following these steps will allow you to take more time for other things, which in the end, is the ultimate goal of delegation !

 If you're ready to delegate to a virtual assistant who can support you while your business is growing, why not consider Flyxie Consulting Services ? Head over to the Contact Page and send a message or request a call back. 

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