Does Your Maid Service Need A Virtual Assistant?

What exactly is a VA?

A virtual assistant (VA) is a remote support assistant for your company. They provide technical and administrative support services.

The great thing about VAs is that they can perform their job from anywhere in the world.

Today’s online expansion has generated many opportunities for positions like these, which are not only desirable, they can revolutionize your business.

What does a virtual assistant do for a Maid Service?

VAs can help you in a variety of aspects within your home cleaning business.

They can help to answer phones and deal with customer service, including any issues that may come up.

Rarely again will you ever have to deal with complaint calls, sales, rescheduling requests, or specific service requests cleaning clients may have.

These are just a few examples under the customer service umbrella.

Consider this scenario: a cleaning client is extra particular on the cleariety of their windows or mirrors.

In this case, your VA can listen and communicate this for your cleaners so that they already know the expectations of this particular home.

Another thing a virtual assistant can also help with is your quote call backs.

Facebook and Google advertising can all be taken care of if this is a part of the business that you prefer to delegate off to your VA.

If procrastination is your thing, they can help with time sensitive tasks where quick responses are critical.

Not all of us are as quick to the draw with responses but a VA has a specific job to do, minimizing your worry and stress.

Other things virtual assistants can do are handle your chat box responses and follow up with reviews from Home Advisor as well as other inquiries via outside websites that potential cleaning clients may have contacted you though.

VAs just do so many things, including handling your team’s daily complications.

These can be some of the most time consuming pieces of running your residential cleaning business.

Some tasks may seem small separately, a lost key here, a missing vacuum there, but they can build up.

When all of these come up on a daily basis they can be quite time consuming and stressful on the psyche, so allow the VA to handle it.

VAs can also take care of emails, credit card payments, invoices, and monitor your accounts receivable so that it doesn’t get too high.

This can ensure that your home cleaning company always has a steady cash flow and keeps up with payroll.

When a cleaning client has missed a payment or two, your VA can do the dirty work of following up with them so that you don’t have to.

This will ensure your Maid Service stays afloat and with forward momentum.

A VA can handle making those quality follow up check-ins that you should do periodically with your cleaning clients to be sure they are receiving services they appreciate.

Calling all your client following a 5 star review, asking them to review you on Facebook or Yelp are things that your virtual assistant will be more than happy to do.

For 4 star reviews, they can even follow up and ask about where improvements can be made in your services.

What would it take for that particular cleaning client to give you a five star rating?

A VA can also check in with low reviews, like a 1 or a 2, this represents a very low and unsatisfactory service for the cleaning client.

Have your VA find out just what happened and use this experience to learn.

By having the VA check in, the client also gets to vent their frustrations to someone who can actually make changes.

An additional way a VA can check in with customers is to follow up on lack of reviews or surveys that you sent out.

Sometimes people simply ignore a survey so this is a second way to get that feedback.

Virtual Assistants are also commonly known to post on social media for your cleaning company as well as help to automate your systems.

They can assist in learning new software and implementing those software programs such as scheduling software, which can be tedious and frustrating for some Maid Service owners to deal with.

Finally, a virtual assistant can help you with email blasts as well as applications, interviews, and the entire hiring process.

Is my Maid Service ready for a VA?

Research and figure out if you have any room in your budget for a virtual assistant for your cleaning company; they can be more affordable than you might think.

Then, consider the size of your company. This factor can often help you to decide whether or not you are in the place for hiring a VA.

Also, consider the time you spend on your residential cleaning business.

Who do you have running your Maid Service?

Some owners may have managers that take care of much of the VA work, so you may not really need one at this stage.

Think about what you want your end goal to be when bringing on a remote assistant.

Sometimes we learn better by doing things ourselves so maybe a VA would hinder your performance rather than boost it at this time.

However, only you can decide when it comes to your home cleaning business.

It’s also important to look within at your current stress level.

Will the strain decrease if you to hire a VA right now?

If you think a VA would help you or your manager with a growing daily work load, then this may be an investment that can help your Maid Service in a huge way.

They can help change the feel of a whole work day by taking care of all of the little tasks that can bog you down.

Also, do you ever find yourself putting off parts of the business simply because you don’t like them? Or because you are flat out terrible at them?

These are the exact things you should hand off to a virtual assistant right away.

Rather than letting your task list build with things you hate, delegate these to your VA, it will change your life.

All the customer complaints calls, or other random things that may mess with your day, give them away.

This way, they are still going to get done but you don’t have to have them weighing on your mind.

You can have the mental energy to use your thoughts for more creative purposes. After all, you deserve it, you run a maid service!

Also, consider this, you have a great idea for a software that can improve your cleaning business and you want to check it out, but you’re unfamiliar with it.

You find yourself letting go of the idea simply because you do not have the brain power with all of the other things on your plate to take the time and learn the new system.

With a VA you don’t have to learn it by yourself, you can have someone to assist you with understanding and implementing the software.

There are oodles of people out there with specialized interest and expertise in these things.

A cleaning business has many moving parts and although much of it may be interesting to learn and do you you, it’s not likely that it will all spark your attention.

However, for a home cleaning company to improve you will still need all of the parts to work, including those you don’t care for.

Having a virtual assistant will free up time and space in your head for other things that matter in your Maid Service.

The above article is based on a live talk given by Maria Dorian at the 2019 Maid Summit, hosted and organized by ZenMaid.

About the presenter

Maria is a mother of four who ran a successful Maid Service out of Austin, Texas for 14 years. She ended up selling it, and everything else she owned to move to Spain with her family .

Maria also co-founded Quality Driven Software and was Head of Support at ZenMaid.

She realized that she could take her experience, strengths, and talents and help other cleaning companies grow their business by becoming a virtual assistant. Maria now runs Task Away VA.

This talk first aired at the 2019 Maid Service Success Summit.

The Maid Summit is an annual online event that brings together the most successful leaders in the cleaning industry, like Debbie Sardone, Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely, Amy Caris, Chris Schwab and more. Get free access to masterclasses and workshops that will help you to grow, scale and automate your cleaning business so you can get more leads and create more profit. Make sure you’re on our email list to find out how to get free tickets to the next event.

If you enjoyed reading this article, check out these ones too:

Does Your Maid Service Need A Virtual Assistant?

What exactly is a VA?

What does a virtual assistant do for a Maid Service?

Is my Maid Service ready for a VA?

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