Hiring a Virtual Assistant: Your Most Frequently Asked Questions

When it comes to hiring a Virtual Assistant, knowledge is power.

That’s why we’ve put together this blog.

A lot of insurance agency owners like you have questions regarding VAs

These are the top 10 Frequently Asked Questions we field when discussing what VAs can do for insurance agencies.

Class asking frequently asking frequently asked questions about virtual assistants

1. What do they cost?

The cost for a Lava Certified Virtual Assistant is $9 per hour for 40 hours a week. We do have part time VAs available, but prices are higher and may vary. In all reality, having a full-time VA be an active part of your team is really a no-brainer. You’ll learn why in the following questions.

2. How does payment work

You as the agency owner pay Lava Automation for 2 weeks up front as soon as a Virtual Assistant is placed with your agency. You can learn more about that process here. After that, 2 weeks are paid for at a time on a recurring basis.

3. Where would I start if I hired a VA?

You’ll want to take a look at your agency and ask some questions. In what areas are we hemorrhaging resources? Where do we see activities not getting completed? What are the tasks that our American workers, the ones who can drive more revenue, spend too much time doing?

What would be the most cost-effective way to get these things done

You’ve got an American, who you’re paying $20-$25 an hour. You can get a VA for $9 to do a lot of the same work. That’s literally half the price or more! There are activities that are being ignored or at the very least are zapping the energy levels of your public-facing workforce. Tasks like the ones you’ll find here.  

You’re going to get your biggest cost savings by having a VA take over certain tasks. You’re going to see efficiency related to profit by freeing up someone who does sell to meet and close more prospects. Knowing where a VA will make the best fit in your agency comes down to either cost savings or efficiency.

4. How do I be successful with a VA from Day 1?

Agencies that spend a minimum of two hours a day on zoom working WITH their Virtual Assistantss are the most successful. You need to look at your VA as an extension of the agency, not as some 3rd-Party who does all the work you don’t want to. Treat them as if they’re part of the team.

When you have team meetings, have the VA join via screen share. Even in the pre-COVID world (and the post-COVID world we’ll eventually return to) when the whole office is sitting in the same room, you can dial in your VAs.

You’ll hear Lava Automation’s Founder Austin Moorhead say this over and over, “Have the person who’s training the VA take their hand off the keyboard!”

This is all for the sake of developing muscle memory. As the trainer (a member of your team) thinks and talks through the details of how to complete the work, the VA is manually doing the work. This also gives the VA insight to their role in your agency and why they’re an important piece.

PRO-TIP: You may want to use this opportunity to record some or all of your training sessions to create a library of training material for your VA to reference. This will also help the onboarding of future team members, whether they’re a VA or not.

One other thing you can do that will take your success with a VA over the top is to create an atmosphere of connectedness. How? Let’s say you’ve got two hours of intentional training per day. What’s wrong with just keeping the zoom meeting open while you’re working?

We do this at Lava Automation. Guess what? We utilize VAs too! Keeping the zoom meeting open let’s us work “together” while working on separate projects. Camaraderie and crushing it, ain’t nothing better!

5. What tools should we use?

We recommend having 3 key tools. Your needs may expand past these, but at the very least you’ll need

A video and screen sharing app – We use Zoom

A Password Manager – We us Lastpass

VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) – We recommend RingCentral

6. What do we give a VA access to?

In short, everything. A Virtual Assistant will need access to everything eventually. Why have them bug you each time they need access to something?

7. What are the risks of not using a VA “placement” service like Lava?

Lava Automation has an established business that pays taxes in the Philippines. That means we are a legal entity in the Philippines and can protect your best interest should something go awry. Side note, take a breath. Nothing has happened during our time placing the best VAs into highly successful agencies. We have a rigorous hiring process to ensure you only get the highest caliber VAs with the utmost integrity.

But, having experience selling insurance ourselves, we prepare for the worst case scenario. If something did happen, we have legal representation in the Philippines. Imagine not having that behind you.

You’ve got a VA, maybe you hired him off of Fiverr or onlinejobs.ph and he goes rogue. What do you do next? Call him and ask nicely for him to right his wrongs? Not gonna happen and you’ll not only be out tons of time and money, but you could be held liable for the actions they took.

8. Where does Lava find the VA’s?

We recruit from a highly skilled corp of computer and software engineers. With long-term relationships with the top colleges in the Philippines, we actually have the privilege of advertising VA jobs to the students both past and present.

We’ll also recruit VAs who’ve been working in call centers for some of the largest companies like AT&T, DoorDash, and Uber. If these companies have workers in the Philippines, maybe they’re onto something??

9. How much Errors and Omissions insurance should we carry? Cyber liability?

We require you to have a million in cyber liability. And we carry a million as well.

10. Do you monitor their activity? How? How much/often?

Yes, in great detail. We have software that takes a screenshot of the VAs computer every ten minutes. This allows you to see what the VA is looking at periodically throughout the day. We also monitor how much activity is being done per second. Moving the mouse counts as an action, typing counts as an action. We ensure you get your money’s worth!

So, What’s Next?

Ready to take the next step in the best business decision you’ll make all year? Hit us up at Info@lavaautomation.com and grab a time to discuss how a Virtual Assistant can increase the productivity and efficiency of your insurance agency

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