Remote Personal Assistant
Scheduling with Success
Having a human scheduling appointments on your behalf sets you apart from the crowd more than ever in a world of web-published calendars and do-it-all mobile devices
Technology-powered tools now available for scheduling are amazing:
- Web apps like Tungle.me and timebridge provide slick functionality for publishing your calendar to the world of people who’d like to select a time to meet with you
- Apple’s Siri takes key scheduling steps on your voice command without you even having to click or swipe
But simply saying “I’ll have my smart phone call your smart phone,” has some key limitations.
Relying entirely on these tools naively implies a business environment in which all parties have an equal interest in meeting. Your most important contacts will appreciate a more personal touch, and human input is critical to navigating the art in that the back-and-forth of “scheduling Ping-Pong,”
So how do you empower your remote admin in the complex and subtle game of business etiquette that starts when two busy people decide to meet and then need to lock down place and time?
It’s not “just” scheduling
Prospective Prialto members will sometimes say they “only” need help with scheduling, as if to imply this is a simple, commodity task.
They are right when the playing field is even and the parties looking to meet have plenty of time. Then it really is simply a matter of finding the next open spot on the calendar. The algorithm is indeed simple, and technology alone may get it done.
Those experienced in leveraging a professional scheduler will more often understand how much time gets consumed. They also know that there is an art to navigating through the complexity of how to time reminders, decide on where to meet and at what time.
Three tactics for getting it right
So how does one best leverage their assistant to track down targets and get you the right meetings in the right place and at the right time?
1) Start slow in the beginning to go fast later:
Many tech equipped, near autonomous knowledge workers have forgotten this basic management need, but there is always a tradeoff between the ease of getting something done yourself today verses taking the time to enable someone else to take it off your hands later. One should never offload key tasks to a new employee without great care. True, you might as well do a task yourself if you will always have to micro mange and explain it to your helper with painful specificity. But micro managing your new scheduler in the beginning is totally appropriate. Take the time to:
- Explain the etiquette of your business and client base
- Download the places you like to meet for which kinds of meetings
- Download the names of your VIPs, the key clients and/or personal contacts that get the highest priority
- Sensitize your assistant on how to discern in your email exchanges the importance of a contact and how that should translate into how a meeting is scheduled
To do all this, you ought to initially watch every email your assistant sends out and then set times to go over and give feedback on how they can be improved. Doing this for just a few days, will quickly yield great time savings and peace-of-mind.
2) Surface key information to the top of long email threads.
A good assistant may successfully disentangle long and complex email threads to decipher what you want done on an email, even if you simply copy him in with no instruction. But it may require a lot of unnecessary energy and time.
A couple of simple specifics as you CC your assistant will save lots of time and energy.
Here’s an email that works well:
Here is an e-mail that does NOT work well:
Develop a scheduling vernacular with your PA
Maintaining positive client relationships with a PA in the middle requires sensitivity. You can’t meet with everyone all the time. You have to prioritize and, while most everyone understands this need, you want to avoid inadvertently insulting even a lower priority contact.
Develop special words that you can place in the kind of email copy above to help your PA prioritize on your behalf.
For example:
- To indicate that you indeed want to meet while tactfully letting your assistant know that this meeting is not the highest priority, say things like “please schedule a coffee” or “please schedule for this month”
- To indicate that a contact, Charlie, is a high priority client who you want to defer to, say something like “please schedule at place and time that works well for Charlie
Oh, and one more thing
See Andy Mowat’s article on how to leverage your assistant to do CRM right. If you are looking to have an assistant help you schedule, you probably are tracking lots of contacts. A CRM and a good CRM process can be amazing tools with which to collaborate with your assistant and track key interactions. But if you’re a relationship person, you probably don’t want to spend too much time meticulously inputting data. Configure your CRM to work with your assistant.
Convivio Navideño: A Heartfelt Thank You
Following is a thank you letter the management at Prialto and BPO Innovations received from its employees in Guatemala.
To the management team at Prialto and BPO Innovations:
Last Saturday we celebrated our “Convivio Navideño” in our own Guatemalan way. The gathering has evolved through the years. It was originally a more meaningful time; a time to gather workmates for a moment and think about the true meaning of Christmas and enjoy a tamal and some fruit punch (a bit different from what you have in the States). Now, it has turned into loud parties, or just a BBQ, brews, and gift exchanges.
Our “Convivio Navideño” this year, however, was different. The party was still loud (and fun!), tamal and fruit punch were quite good. The difference is that Alexis* sent a message of the true meaning of Christmas – that it is a time for appreciation and gratitude.
I want to thank you, not only for the gift that you’ve given us but for remembering that there’s a person behind the phone, for making this call center unique from the others in this country. All of us have worked at call centers before, and yet this is the first time we don’t feel like a number, and that means a lot to us.
Have a very Merry Christmas!!
Eddie
*Alexis Rivas is the CEO of BPO Innovations in Guatemala
Growing a small consulting firm
Many small consulting companies struggle with building capacity and finding technical solutions that will serve their needs and make them more productive while keeping costs at a manageable level.
Member Profile
Cordoba Consulting is a two-person enterprise in the transportation industry. The company is steadily growing and occasionally contracts subconsultants for larger projects.
Background
Handling and managing administrative tasks take time and resources. Much of the daily billable work for small consulting companies revolves around client meetings, appointment scheduling, and project management. Even on an extended workday, very little time is left for tasks such as updating recurring reports, invoicing, booking travel, and dealing with technical issues. In addition, while consultants are either meeting with a client or working on a job, calls are inevitably left unanswered. The obvious solution would be to hire an administrative assistant and an IT consultant, but for most small companies, this solution is just not an option – it’s simply too expensive. So, Cordoba Consulting sought to find a cost-effective solution, which they found with Prialto.
Solution
Prialto developed a human resource and technology infrastructure that supported the company’s business. A remote personal assistant was assigned to handle administrative tasks such as answering inbound calls, coordinating meetings, and managing consultants’ calendars. In addition, a technology solution was put in place to seamlessly manage communication between clients and consultants. Prialto Collaboration Suite, an enterprise-class collaboration platform, was implemented. This service includes email (plus push email), contact information, calendar, and online file storage. Prialto also took on the management of the company’s domain registration and DNS.
Conclusion
With the Prialto solution, the staff at Cordoba Consulting are now able to focus on their core business. The company has effectively added an executive assistant and IT support at less than half the cost of hiring two additional employees. Gone are missed opportunities due to unanswered calls, so are the hours spent on administrative tasks. In its place is an affordable, efficient solution that provides the human touch lacking in an increasingly automated world, and a technology system and support that is scalable, robust and dependable.
The art of appointment scheduling: Even making a dental appointment can create a Wow! moment
Finding a dentist in a specific location that uses nitrous oxide and accepts a member’s insurance seemed like an ordinary request, which it was, until one finds out the amount of work that went into it.
A Prialto member put it this way: “I gave Eddie (a Prialto personal assistant) an easy first task that I thought he could over deliver on, just as I would a new employee, but he found a way to artfully over deliver!
What was so impressive with how Eddie executed the task? After he narrowed down the search to a dental office that met all three requirements (location, nitrous, insurance) based on reviews he found on Yelp and other review sites, he did not stop there; he did not just pass on the information to the member and called it a day. Instead, he went further by checking the member’s calendar and picked a date and time when the member would be free. He then called the doctor’s office to make the appointment. He was told that new patients could only be scheduled after certain information has been submitted. Eddie then asked the receptionist what they needed, called the member and wrote down the information, and confirmed with the date and time of the appointment with the member. Eddie proceeded to call the receptionist, gave her the requested information, and firmed up the appointment.
Pretty thorough, huh? Well, not for Eddie. After confirming the appointment, he also took it upon himself to research parking garages in the area, their rates, and the availability of metered parking. He sent this information to the member’s email and iPhone, along with directions (with a link to a map) to the clinic.
All this was done while the member was going through his day at work, which enabled him to focus on his business instead of spending an hour or so performing the task.
Wow moment? Our member thought so.
She saved me more time than I even realized!
How do you efficiently schedule 20 separate phone interviews? Have your remote personal assistant do it!
I had a list of about 20 individuals, all located in the East Coast, with schedules as hectic as mine. Contacting them and trying to coordinate a time to talk would have taken me 2-3 hours, which I did not have. So, I turned to Remelie, my personal assistant, to manage the process. I sent her a spreadsheet containing all the contact information, and as she had access to my calendar, she proceeded to contact each person on the list. Throughout that day and in the succeeding morning, I could see my calendar updating on my iPhone. The calls were scheduled and made seamlessly throughout the week – all without interruption to my existing schedule.
What made the execution of the task memorable was not that the calls were scheduled, but that my assistant took the initiative to research some of the incorrect phone numbers that I had given her without calling me. She knew I had a busy week, so instead of asking me, she found other ways to get the information. On one occasion, she tracked down one of the candidates by searching him on Google. She found his former employer, contacted them, told them who she was and the purpose of the call, and asked them to verify the phone number she had (I had transposed a couple of numbers). They told her which two numbers were off.
I only knew about what she had done when the candidate informed me of how determined Remelie was in attempting to get the correct phone number. He was impressed. Remelie never told me what she did, as she considers this kind of follow through part of what she does. Wow!
You can’t buy that kind of follow through today. Don’t outsource just to save money. Outsource to find the right talent and attitude when you can’t find it nearby. That’s what Prialto helps you do.