jeylabs

Many businesses use remote workers as Virtual Assistants (VAs) to accomplish more things daily. One of the biggest shifts in business operations we are seeing is the increasing use of Virtual Assistants and Software bots.

Overworked business executives see this as a way to improve their productivity and work-life balance.

In this post, I discuss the need for SaaS solutions to support a VA/Bot Mode.

At jeylabs, we employ technology to improve everyday work experiences for our clients. We spend most of our waking hours playing with technology such as RPA at our LABS to do this. We have Technology Centres of Excellence where a lot of R&D activity is undertaken. We develop products, solutions, integration pieces, controls, gap fillers and so on.

We also use many of the best of breed technology out there for our internal needs. We use Social media heavily. We use automation tools such as RPA. We also utilise our offshore teams for serious value add.

We assist clients with not only offshore software development & testing services but also business process outsourcing where timezones are taken advantage of to deliver value add.

Virtual Assistants and software bots are used in our internal operations. We use them for managing manual tasks that are boring or laborious. We mostly use automated systems or bots for these but there are a set of tasks that just need a human touch.

An example of it would be to find a list of articles that we want to dig deep further for some research we are undertaking. A Virtual Assistant trained in such a task would be perfect for this job. Better yet they can do this while you are sleeping and the following morning you are ready to work on the most important part of the job.

We actually empower our VAs with specific tools. We delegate tasks to our VAs and they should be able to use the systems we have and use them as efficiently as possible. Some times they need to be able to use it exactly as we would.

As an example, If we are using http://www.papersapp.com, we would use a team subscription license and get our VA to do some preliminary work. We would then review that shared work and build upon that.

Most SaaS solutions out there allow for team access like this. But they don’t really cater for delegated access. The only way to delegate is for your VA to have access to your account. This is dangerous on a number of fronts and we stay away from this.

This lack of delegation functionality is actually a massive gap in today’s SaaS solutions. This needs a Fix.

Linkedin is a prime example of a tool where I would prefer my VA to use my account under “delegation”. I will happily pay an additional fee for this access.

The activity of my VA has to be audited and restricted to certain areas & functions, I grant her access to. It also must go through a review process for certain aspects with content versioning and roll back available.

This feature will allow me to selectively delegate tasks to VAs and achieve significantly increased levels of productivity. It is a shame that this is still not available.

In our view, “VA/Bot mode” is the key feature set that will change the SaaS experience of senior execs forever. A software bot can also be given further access via this mode.

This is just a small step from the Team level access that most platforms already provide. But, this is the single most productivity boost that none of them is allowing it. I predict that this feature alone will become a reason for SaaS platforms to stand out.

Do you know of an app that does this well already? Email me at bots@jeylabs.com