Offshore Virtual Assistants – Myths and Realities – Part 2

You know, you are a great virtual assistant. Now you have to pursuade your clients that you are great, greater than the other 25,000 or so of virtual admin support providers worldwide, many of whom work for one tenth of what you charge. Yes, it’s a tough thing to do.

Myth - Offshore virtual assistants provide low-quality results

Ok, maybe it’s just me, but I find it very unprofessional and off-putting when people try to advertise their own advantages by saying that others’ services/products are a piece of junk. I don’t buy from these competitor-bashers. On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with saying that although your competitor offers an attractive service, your offer is so much better because…

In this particular case, I hear a lot about how awful, simply awful these offshore VAs are; how the quality of their work is so low; how their e-mails and documents are full of grammatical mistakes, etc. All these comlaints and horror stories come from other VAs, not from clients.

Going back to Elance… Only 7% of US-based virtual assistants registered on Elance have feedback scores above 90%. Indian VAs outperform 3-to-1 with 21% of providers having feedback scores of above 90%.

Now, here are two lists of most-often cited complaints, in no particular order:

List A

• Provider needed extensive training   
• Projects delivered late
• Quality issues

List B

• Projects delivered late
• Quality issues
• Provider did not fully understand requirements

List A shows most-often cited complaints for US-based VAs. List B – for India-based VAs. This is getting interesting… Besides, keep in mind that quality is very subjective and different clients have very different definitions and expectations of quality.

For example, one client might need 100 articles for his upcoming article marketing campaign. Another one only needs 5 articles. As their marketing approaches differ, so do their requirements and, by extension, their expectations of what an article should be. You can get blue in the face talking about stylistic perfection of each of your articles, your flawless grammar, your individual take on each issue. That’s all great and definitely worth the price, unless your client doesn’t need it.  

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Related posts:

1. Offshore virtual assistants – Myths and Realities – Part 1
2. Offshore Virtual Assistants – Myths and Realities – Part 3
3. Get Great Articles Without Going Broke