As we remember, there are two groups of customers — internal and external. To service them, there are multiple types of Customer Support Solutions that a business can provide. Many businesses only tend to focus on one kind of service; they get really good at using one of the following types of customer service:

*  Phone Service

*  Email Service

*  Live Chat

Wouldn’t it be much better for you if you provided a comprehensive customer service experience for your clients? You’re probably scratching your head and saying “What do you mean by comprehensive customer service experience?”

A small business can utilize multiple methods to provide award-winning assistance to their customer or client. Here’s what I’m suggesting. Why not combine all three of the services I mentioned and cement them together with the use of a knowledge base and a forum? Let’s look deeper into the three main services:

Phone Service

We all are familiar with phone service; we use either a land line, cell phone, or VoIP all day long. The problem is though that many, many businesses have implemented menus for answering their phones and made it next to impossible for a client to get to an actual human. By the time the client does get to an actual representative, the client is usually irritated and seeing red. You are a virtual assistant. Don’t let that happen to your business!

Email Service

You may be familiar with companies that utilize email ticket service. I’m sure you’ve sent in an email to a business and been told your ticket number is xxx. These same companies have the ability to implement set responses that they can send out to the person at the click of a button. They can receive reporting, they can customize how their tickets look, assign tickets to users, and customize fields to fit them. This type of service is superior to phone in my estimation because you have a written record of all the conversations that you have had with a customer and can refer back to it at any given time. This allows you to provide a more advanced pleasurable experience for your customer.

Live Chat

Live Support Software (also known as Live Chat or Live Help) refers to handling incoming customer inquiries with the use of an instant messaging application. Similar to phone service where the customer has instant interaction with a customer representative, the benefits of live chat are numerous. Let me show you just a few:

*  There is little or no cost to implement it; it’s all done over the Internet.

*  Most live chat is fully customizable

*  You can monitor your clients visits with ease

*  Set hours can be established for the customer care representative(s) to be online or offline.

*  There are even more benefits not listed here.

As a virtual assistant, you want to be able to provide your clients with easy access to you should they have questions or want to order services. This is why I recommend implementing a comprehensive customer service experience for your client. To do this, you use a combination of phone, email, and live chat; BUT you also give your clients two additional types of service:

Knowledge Base

Think of a knowledge base as an online library that your client can go to get answers to common questions. You can add articles that you’ve written, put them in your knowledge base, and even categorize them.

Forum

In addition, you can set up your own forum. A forum is different from a live chat in that the forum is discussion threads that do not show in real time. To see new posts, the user will need to refresh their internet browser.

With those five methods, you can give your clients the very best customer service experience. Don’t kid yourself – providing first-class customer service is vital to the success of your business. I know of at least one company out there that will host four out of the five methods into a hosting solution with absolutely no cost. That’s right; I said no cost.

Comm100 is an open source company that provides services to large Fortune 500 companies. If they can provide a comprehensive customer service experience, then you can do the same for your clients. Why not look into it right now while you’re thinking about it. You won’t regret it.

When you bought your Straight Talk phone, you needed to purchase a service plan that went with it. The service plan you purchased was obviously pretty dependent on your budget at the time, right? Well, now it’s time to make sure your service plan doesn’t run out on you.

Refill Options

There are two main types of refill options you have open to you using their website:

1. Automatic refill – When your service days are over, your can have your phone refilled automatically and charged to a credit card of your choice.
2. Refill on-demand – You would have to renew each month manually in order to continue your plan

How do I know when my service plan expires?

1. Go to Straight Talk and click on “Check Balance/Service Date in the upper right-hand corner of your window (It’s right next to a star).

1. Left click Submit (You’ll see the fourth field is Service End Date.) Now, you can also check how many minutes you have left, how many SMS text messages you have, and how many megabytes of data available for Web browsing you have.

If you need to refill your phone, click on the Home button.

1.        Click on the Refill/Enroll Tab

You will see three options on this page:

a.  Need to buy a service plan. This is where you would log into your account.
b.  Refill by adding a service card
c.  Enroll in Auto-Refill Now! (Optional)

2.        Choose option a by entering in your email address and password and click on Log In. (If you don’t have an account yet, you’ll need to register. Just click the tab that says Activate/Register
3.        Click on submit if your phone information is showing correctly
4.        Choose your service plan by clicking in the dot to the left of the service plan you want
5.        Choose Auto-Refill or Refill On Demand
6.        Click Submit
7.        Read the information and make sure your credit card information is correct. If not, you’ll need to call Customer Service and request them to edit it. Also, Write down your service end date and put it in a place that you can find easily.
8.        Read the terms and conditions and then check the box to indicate you have done so.
9.        Click on Submit
10.     Click Print or Done

That’s all there is to it.

*****
Pam Lokker is a skillful writer and proficient virtual assistant. Borlok Virtual Assistants is the place to get global expert VA services with quality and on-time delivery.

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If you’ve recently been laid off from a position within a company, and you’ve been pounding the pavement with little or no success at landing an interview, let alone a new job, then listen up. There is hope.

If you have the drive and determination to succeed and work out of your own home, there is an alternative work arrangement that you might want to consider. Besides the flexibility of setting your own hours, there are many more benefits of becoming a virtual assistant, with the ultimate goal of being able to bring in extra money for the bills and to put food on the table, without paying out a lot in the way of equipment.

Now you may be wondering what kind of things a person could possibly do from home – especially if you are used to working in an office. And, just what is this freelancing that I mentioned in the title? You also might be wondering how to get into freelancing. Well, let’s take a look briefly at each question.

What is freelancing?

According to Wikipedia, “A freelancer, freelance worker, or freelance is a self-employed person who pursues a profession without a long-term commitment to any particular employer. The term was first used by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) in Ivanhoe to describe a “medieval mercenary warrior” or “free-lance”. Some additional synonyms you might hear tossed around are contractor and independent contractor.

How can you get into freelancing?

The easiest way to get into freelancing is through one of the multiple freelance marketplaces that abound on the Internet. The one that I use, in particular, is Looking for work? Sign up at Elance and search over 30,000 jobs today.. Elance has been around since 1998 when it was founded. Privately held and headquartered in Mountain View, California, this company is insistent that it be the most widely used application for Services and Contractor Management. According to their website, more than 200,000 employees are using Elance in all facets of finding, buying, managing and paying external services and contractors from more than 2,000 suppliers across 50+ services categories. You will register with them in the specific niche that you want to pursue. When you are paid, Elance, of course, will take their cut; but they are the one site that I feel has the highest quality standards.

What kind of things can you freelance in?

Elance offers a wide variety of categories that a virtual assistant can mix and match in to complement their abilities and expertise. The two categories that I’m personally signed up for are Admin. Support and Writing & Translation; these will cover a wide array of services that you can specialize in.

I’m not saying you will get rich at freelancing, but I do attest to the fact that you can make money by freelancing. If you work hard, bid reasonably, and maintain high quality standards, you just might enjoy it so much while bringing in an extra income that you’ll want to continue.

Yes, indeed. There are several freelance marketing sites out there where you can post a project and have eager providers bid on the project in the hopes that you will choose them. It is definitely possible to get good help through outsourcing.

Overview

One of those sites is Elance. Elance has been around since 1998 when it was founded. Privately held and headquartered in Mountain View, California, this company had a vision that has allowed it to become the most widely used application for Services and Contractor Management. According to their website, More than 200,000 employees are using Elance in all facets of finding, buying, managing and paying external services and contractors from more than 2,000 suppliers across 50+ services categories.

Why

With over 169,000 expert professionals in Elance as of this writing, you can’t possibly go wrong. You need someone to write articles for you? No problem. Elance has a category for that. Need someone to do website design? Yup, Elance has a category for that, as well. You have a wide variety of professionals that you can choose from. Just take a look at the major categories that you can post a job in:

* Web and Programming
* Design and Multimedia
* Writing and Translation
* Administrative Support
* Sales and Marketing
* Finance and Management
* Legal
* Engineering and Manufacturing

Within each major category, you have a wide array of skills for hire. Let’s look at just five examples in the Design and Multimedia as an example:

* Graphic Design
* Photography
* Animation
* Dreamweaver
* Videography

And this is just a sampling. There are 30 more skills within the Design and Multimedia major category. Are you beginning to see the wide field of opportunity for getting outsourced help easily?

How

It’s easy. With the Elance Work System, it’s a piece of cake to hire professionals with a standardized way to post jobs and receive proposals, hire, manage, and pay for results, and also enables collaboration, tracking progress and providing feedback. What could be easier?

Time is of the essence

As more and more companies are trying to tighten their expenses, outsourcing your jobs out to freelancers only makes sense.  Perhaps you are behind on finalizing your marketing plan or just plain need extra help to fill in for someone that is sick. Well, don’t stress out about it. Now is your opportunity to Find a world of talent online at Elance. Post your job today. now! You won’t be sorry you did.

A virtual assistant is frequently asked to write or rewrite all kinds of material – anything from a letter on up to a book. Using the right tools can ensure that your material is content rich; one of those tools is a thesaurus. Learn firsthand what a thesaurus is and what it’s used for.

If you are a virtual assistant, undoubtedly you will eventually have a client that wishes you to rewrite something he or she may have penned or typed. It’s not always an easy task to find just the right words to capture the essence of what is being said in an interesting and accurate manner. Now is the time to make your articles rich in content by using a thesaurus.

What is it you might ask? A thesaurus is just the tool you need; it’s a book that has a classified
list of synonyms. You remember what a synonym is from your days in English class at school, right? According to the Encarta English Dictionary (provided in Microsoft Word 2007), a synonym is a word that means the same, or almost the same, as another word in the same language, either in all of its uses or in a specific context. Examples of synonyms in this sense are “environment” and “surroundings” and the verbs “tear” and “rip.”

So why is a thesaurus useful in making your content rich when you write or rewrite articles? For one thing, if you replace words with synonyms, your content might just grab and keep the reader’s interest that much longer. You’ve all heard that you only have thirty seconds to stimulate a reader’s natural curiosity so they dive deeper into your article.

What are some good thesaurus’s out there that I can use online? I will discuss three here. Don’t take my word as gospel, however; do a search in your favorite search engine under “thesaurus.” I want you to have the freedom to make up your own mind as to which one will work the best for you.

Unless I’m working on a laptop, the very first thesaurus that I use all the time is WordWeb. WordWeb is a free English thesaurus and dictionary software download for Windows. Why do I like it? Just check out some of the things it can help you with:

* Definitions and synonyms
* Proper nouns
* Related words
* Pronunciations
* 150 000 root words
* 120 000 synonym sets
* Looks up words in almost any program

What makes Word Web so useful is that you have the ability to use a combination of the Ctrl + Alt + the W keys on your computer keyboard to have the program open on your desktop. This saves immeasurable time and is even faster than the next program I am going to talk about.

Remember I mentioned that I work on a laptop? One of the disadvantages of doing so is that a laptop will not have as much memory as a desktop so I do not tend to download a lot of software. What I have discovered is that Microsoft Office Word 2007 has a built-in thesaurus. How do you kick it into gear? To give you a simple explanation, say I want to change the word gear in my previous sentence to something else. I would right click on the word gear and scroll down to Look Up, left click with your mouse on the words Look Up and voilà! It will automatically default to All Reference Books, but that is easy to change. Just click on the down arrow next to All Reference Books and change it to Thesaurus: English (You can also choose French or Spanish).

A virtual assistant has to be thrifty in their use of time, as well as being the best of the best. Oftentimes, there will be resources available to us that we don’t even know that can save us an immense amount of work. One of those resources is a good thesaurus. A good thesaurus can not only save us time, it can provide us with synonyms that will help us write and rewrite articles, blogs, press releases, eBooks, etc., that are award-winning. Not only that, a thesaurus can help us make our material rich in content.

You’ve all heard the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” right? Or, this dog is going to roll over and play dead? Well, I’m here to dispute these facts. Of course, you have to realize that the old dog we’re talking about at this time is me, okay? I get so excited sometimes about the things that I learn each and every day – new things on blogging, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, article writing – I can hardly contain myself.

For me, I’m very glad this old dog can learn new tricks. I’m not going to roll over and play dead. I get up in the morning with anticipation – what is this day going to bring? What am I going to learn today? How can I make a difference to virtual assistants and clients out there?

Nobody knows who came up with this short saying:

Yesterday is HISTORY
Tomorrow is a MYSTERY
Today is a GIFT
That’s why it’s called the ‘PRESENT’

Take each day as a gift and live it to the fullest. Learn as much as you can and be grateful for what you know already.

If I were to give any new virtual assistant some benefit of my knowledge that I’ve gained over the years, it would be to definitely look at each day with new eyes. Search for opportunities to learn, and tuck the gold coins of knowledge in your memory library for instant recall later on in life. You will be amazed at how much you have learned over the years.

This old dog isn’t going to roll over and play dead. Are you?

Remember when Borlok Virtual Assistants took the leap and decided to migrate to a self-hosting website in order to be better equipped to keep up with the competition and provide services that our clients would like to see? Well, in order to do that, Borlok VA decided to migrate from WordPress.com over to WordPress.org.

Now of course we went through all the fears and trepidations of deciding whether that was really the wise, strategic choice and did lots of research before deciding that it was truly the best course of action. We started out doing our research on WordPress.org and quickly came to realize that they had made the decision much easier for us.

WordPress.org goes out of their way to provide recommendations for hosting companies that will be compatible with their newest version and will meet their minimum requirements. For the well-being of their company, the partners at Borlok VA felt that no decision should be made lightly and took extra time to research each company that was recommended at http://wordpress.org/hosting/.

After examining the five sites they had listed and weighing the pros and cons of each, the partners decided to go with Blue Host. Among the various reasons we chose this company were that they were touted to have excellent customer service; but do they REALLY mean that? I mean, after all, we were going to need support if we got into trouble, right?

Read on my friends. Besides Blue Host being affordable (something that small businesses with little budget can appreciate), they also have unlimited hosting space, unlimited file transfer, 24/7 support/customer service, and much more. They have a Help system that you really have to see to believe – videos to walk you through steps and well-laid-out documentation to make your life with them easier.

Remember that customer service we went with them for? Borlok VA found themselves in multiple situations where they needed help – and needed it as soon as possible. The method they chose to communicate with Blue Host was their Live Chat feature.  Now I know that many of you will be looking for other reasons as their primary determinant on which self-hosting company to look for, but Borlok Virtual Assistants is totally satisfied with the customer service and services that Blue Host offers.

As a matter of fact, I just had the worst nightmare as far as one of our sites. Someone thought it would be neat to infect our site with bugs, worms, secret coding, you know, some of the yucky things that no business owner wants. Well, Blue Host was super helpful via their Live Chat, and VERY patient. After all, my knowledge only went so far. You could not ask for better customer service.

What is the bottom line for this company in our opinion? If you are looking to upgrade your WordPress.com website to a self-hosted site, then we highly recommend Blue Host. We have not had any negative experiences with them thus far. Therefore, the answer to our title, “Is Blue Host Really a Host and Do They Provide Excellent Service?” is YES.

You’ve all heard the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” right? Well, I’m here to dispute that fact. Of course, you have to realize that the old dog we’re talking about at this time is me, okay? I get so excited sometimes about the things that I learn each and every day – new things on blogging, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, article writing – I can hardly contain myself.

If I were to give any new virtual assistant some benefit of my knowledge that I’ve gained over the years, it would be to definitely look at each day with new eyes. Search for opportunities to learn, and tuck the gold coins of knowledge in your memory library for instant recall later on in life. You will be amazed at how much you have learned over the years.

For me, I’m very glad this old dog can learn new tricks.

So, you’ve taken the bit in your teeth; and you’ve decided to take the leap and start your own virtual assistant business. Have you really thought this through? Do you have the equipment you need for your office? Have you decided on what services you will provide to your clients in your specialized niche? While I have seen it written in reports that most small businesses won’t even begin to turn a profit and start to become successful for two years, don’t let that dissuade you.

There are many reasons to start a new virtual assistance business, even in this downturned economy. Well, as I sit here and think about it, here are a few of my personal favorites. Number one benefit is that you get to see new and sometimes exciting scenery. As I sit here reflecting on the benefits of working out of your home, I gaze out the window and see the birds twittering and singing in the trees. Look! There is a grackle at the bird bath dipping his food in the water to soften it, even in the soft falling rain that is falling on this wonderful Thanksgiving Day. Usually it’s a piece of dog food that he has stolen from some unsuspecting dog that’s catching forty winks. It’s such a hard job, you know, being a watchdog.

My faithful cat, Yoda, sleeps next to me keeping me company. She’s not too interested in the birds now; she appointed herself as guardian of the birds and has been watching them all morning. She’s tired now. Sshhh, don’t disturb her; it’s time for her catnap.

Second benefit is that you have climate control. Brrr, it’s cold in the house. Hey, Sis. Would you mind turning the air conditioner down? Can you beat that? You can adjust your own thermostat to the temperature YOU like. You don’t have to wait for maintenance where you’re working to say – Well, everyone else is just fine. You’ll just have to put a sweater on or quit your gosh-darned complaining. Put some clothes on!

Now I know you will all like this benefit. You get to take your break when you want to. You can decide what hours you want to work. Got to take your child to the doctor? No problem. It’s up to you what you want to work, as long as you get out what you commit to to your client. Speaking of my sis, she’s sitting next to me playing solitaire. She says “This is my breakfast break.” Shame on her — she should be working! She says “My job is done! You’re the cog in the wheel now.”

Oh, I forgot to tell you. When you work virtual, your faithful canine companion gets to lay by your side helping you work. The benefit? Your dog or cat does not have to be alone all day. If you have children, you are home when your children need you.

Oh, did I mention that the stress level is nearly, totally gone? You don’t have someone breathing down your neck. You don’t have scheduled annual or semi-annual reviews. Your supervisor doesn’t constantly harp that you must be a team member, you must do this job this way, etc. You can even have the radio on or the TV on low.

Working virtual is rewarding. I warn you, however, when you start your business, you will undoubtedly work more hours than if you were working full-time at a company. You know what though? You will enjoy it much more because you will be doing it for yourself.

Your expenses will be lowered. Now wait until you hear this. You won’t have to buy gas, commute, travel long distances, or get stuck in traffic. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?

What about the clothes you wear for work? You won’t have to buy an expensive wardrobe. You can work in your pajamas if you want or dress as casually as you want when you work at home. Don’t feel like putting on makeup or slaving over your hair, Ladies? You got it. You can work from your home (as long as you don’t have clients coming to your home) being just the way you want to be. Shed those jackets and ties, Men. Relax and wear your grungiest t-shirt if you want.

Here is the main benefit – it is just wonderful and self-satisfying. So if you are considering delving into the world of creating your own virtual assistance business, let me reassure you that you can do it. With perseverance and drive, you can do anything you set out to do.  Why not take the leap and do it now!