How to Best Leverage Your Engagement Manager

By Emily Roner | Updated: 29 Apr, 2019

Your Engagement Manager is your partner in ensuring your virtual assistant service is effective. They take all of your ideas, questions, and concerns and use that info to better train your assistant and make sure you get maximum value.

This article will teach you how to leverage your Engagement Manager to:

  • Offload additional tasks
  • Adopt new tools
  • Get ideas for new processes
  • Improve your assistant’s work and behavior

Leveraging your Engagement Manager in those four areas will ensure you get maximum value from our service.

Offload Additional Tasks

Over time, your support needs may expand beyond the two to four processes outlined in your implementation plan. When that happens, your Engagement Manager is there to help.

Here’s how to offload additional tasks:

  • Send your Engagement Manager an email about the process you’d like to offload.
  • If it’s a project we can be successful at, they’ll schedule a training call where you walk through how to complete the task.
  • Your Engagement Manager will record the meeting, document your process, and train your PA and backup on it.

In the weeks that follow, your Engagement Manager will monitor your PA’s work to ensure they complete your new process successfully.

Adopt New Tools

One of the key benefits of hiring a Prialto PA is that they’ll help you gain additional leverage from your tools - including new ones that you have limited to no experience with.

If you’re interested in using a new tool, let your Engagement Manager know and they’ll help drive your adoption process. We commonly help members set up new tools including:

  • CRMs
  • Task management software
  • Marketing automation software

View our Tools Database for a list of tools we have experience with. If the tool you’re interested in isn’t listed, we’re happy to learn how to use it.

Once you purchase the tool, they’ll help you set it up, provision access to your PA, and create processes for your PA to use the tool on your behalf.

If you’re not sure what tools are right for you, they can also give you recommendations based on your budget, PA’s expertise, and goals.

For strategies to get your whole team on board with new tools, check out our article:

How to Successfully Implement New Workplace Technologies

Get Ideas for New Processes

When you purchase our services, you get about 12.5 hours of service per week. During your onboarding period, your Engagement Manager will work closely with you to ensure you delegate enough work to fill that time. However, your utilization may decrease over time.

For some members, this occurs because their PA become increasingly efficient at their processes so the tasks that were initially offloaded consume less time. For others, their business evolves and they no longer need support for the same tasks they offloaded when they started service.

If this happens, your Engagement Manager will reach out to you to get a better idea of your goals and your day-to-day tasks. Then, they’ll suggest additional tasks you can offload. Once you decide what works for you, they’ll help get your PA up-to-speed on your new processes.

Improve Your Assistant’s Work and Behavior

We are committed to providing you with exceptional service. If at any point your PA’s performance does not meet your expectations, let your Engagement Manager know.

We have a very strong learning culture and view all constructive criticism as opportunities to improve. Though you are free to provide feedback directly to your assistant, many of our members prefer leveraging their Engagement Managers. This allows them to state their concerns in a very direct way and enables their Engagement Managers to work with their assistants to drive improvements.

There are two ways you can loop your Engagement Manager into the challenges you’re experiencing:

  1. Reach out to them directly via phone or email to describe what you want to be improved. If they aren’t immediately available, they’ll reach out to schedule a meeting with you to discuss your concerns.
  2. Use your feedback links. Every day, your assistant sends you a Prialto Daily Review (PDR) email that contains a summary of what they did for you that day as well as any reminder or questions they have for you. That email contains feedback links that let you rate your assistant behavior ranging from “poor” to “great.” To provide feedback, simply click the link and add comments about what you were unhappy about.

In each of these cases, your Engagement Manager will make sure they fully understand the challenges you’re experiencing. Once they do, they’ll take actions to prevent further mistakes from happening including:

  • Coaching your assistant on how to improve their poor work quality and/or behavior.
  • Giving your assistant additional training to fill in any knowledge and/or skills gaps they have.
  • Having your assistant's direct manager increase the frequency and depth of their quality assurance checks on their work.

Your Engagement Manager will check in with you to confirm that improvements have been made. To learn more download our guide to working with a virtual assistant.

Amplify Your Productivity

About the author: Emily leads Prialto's content production and distribution team with a special passion for helping people realize success. Her work and collaborations have appeared in Entrepreneur, Inc. and the Observer among others.