We are coming in hot with another case study, this time with our ecommerce client, Camilla. Camilla designs and sells top quality, custom scarves and jewelry, using materials sourced from female artisans. We hope once you’ve read this month’s case study you’ll ask yourself, Hey, why don’t I have a virtual assistant?
Moving from Brick and Mortar to Ecommerce
Camilla came to us a few months after moving her physical store to an ecommerce platform. As she became busier, she found herself losing the joy that she had felt when she first started her business. Important administrative tasks were now daunting, and customer care had begun to fall through the cracks. These tasks were taking away time from Camilla’s passions and the reason she created her store in the very beginning: to immerse herself in the culture of her artisans through travel and connection.
She hoped that by getting help from a virtual assistant (VA) company, she could hand off the tasks that were grinding her down. Camilla wanted more time for what inspires her to create beautiful scarves and jewelry: the stories of the craftswomen behind the materials.
Finding the Right Virtual Assistant
Initially, she sought help from an offshore VA company, but communication and different time zones proved to be challenging. This ultimately led to the end of Camilla’s relationship with that VA company, and the beginning of her relationship with Admin Slayer.
Camilla already had a small team of virtual staff to support her ecommerce business, but she needed additional help with the following areas:
Customer care management, including processing returns and exchanges
Procedure manual creation
Social media and online presence support
Adding products to her website
Travel arrangements and expenses
Sales data reporting
We LOVE helping small businesses, watching them grow and succeed. We deeply sympathized with Camilla and wanted to see her take back her passion, and ultimately, her business. The tasks that she handed off to us are what make us tick, so we were excited to help by doing the things we are passionate about. Some would call this a win-win situation!
Customer Care & Social Media Management
Camilla was nervous about handing over the customer care side of her ecommerce business. It was something she had never been able to delegate before, and her previous VA company didn’t leave her with any procedure manuals or process documents. This was a great place for us to start with Camilla – our slayers are top notch experts in high touch customer service. We know that this is one of the most important parts of any business - ecommerce or otherwise.
As we began to handle returns, exchanges and customer inquiries through the wholesale inbox, we built a procedure manual that any future member of Camilla’s team could use and immediately run with. At the same time, we created email templates that expressed Camilla’s warm communication style, while also improving efficiency and reducing the amount of time (and money) spent on conversations that were frequently repeated in her business. We then started to work with her warehouse staff to ensure that shipments were processed as effectively as possible, using Slack to communicate in real time.
Another challenge for Camilla was the expense of maintaining full-time staff and ensuring they had enough work to fill the hours. By using contractors and billing our clients only for the time that they need us each month (down to the minute), whether it’s 16 or 40 hours, Camilla was able to dial up or down her need for our services as her business journeyed through the peaks and valleys of retail ecommerce sales.
Once the customer care side of her ecommerce business was running smoothly, Camilla found herself able to spend a bit more time on travel - and she wanted more. Once she had experienced the quality of our work, she could trust us with the rest of her to-do list. We even found new ways to maximize efficiencies, reducing unnecessary administration hours to save her money.
Next, we took social media management off of her plate. Camilla enjoyed doing it, but wasn’t able to maintain consistency with her already heavy workload. She understood the importance of it and handed it off to us. We use Buffer to schedule her social media posts and promote new products, and YouTube videos that demonstrate the many different ways to wear Camilla’s beautiful scarves and jewelry.
We also started adding the new products to her ecommerce website using Shopify. Camilla had been doing this entirely by herself, but the updates were taking her far too long and she lost business due to delays. By delegating this task to us, products are now uploaded in real time so that customers can quickly see and purchase the latest designs. Camilla gets to spend more of her time being creative with her product photography, and we efficiently get them uploaded and priced as soon as she hands them off.
Increasing Efficiency
A few other items we helped with:
Camilla’s calendar and travel arrangements, to save her time
Expense management – to ensure her books are in order and every receipt is accounted for
Task and project management using Asana to ensure no task gets missed, and every deadline is met
Sales reporting - Camilla wanted better reporting, but didn’t have the time, or the headspace to get this started. We swooped in with Quickbooks to give her the important data she needed to keep her business running smoothly, from anywhere she happens to be in the world
A Winning Formula
By adding us to her team, and increasing her delegation as her trust grew, Camilla was finally able to travel the world again, spending months with the artists that inspire her. She no longer has to focus her mind on social media management, expense reporting, customer care or pesky website image uploads. With more headspace for creativity and travel, Camilla found her joy again, and is spending her time doing what is meaningful to her. Ultimately, this means success for her ecommerce business.
By reducing burnout and helping to eliminate the often unending lists of daunting tasks, we often see our clients having a better work-life balance and getting back to doing what they love and why they started their business in the first place.
Virtual Assistants for Everyone
Remember the beginning of Camilla’s story when we said you’d be asking yourself, Hey, why don’t I have a virtual assistant? If you’re still not quite there, we encourage you to meet Samantha. She’s our financial advisor whose administrative processes are now working like a well-oiled machine in the background, as she focuses on her core competencies and leaves the scheduling and client follow-up to us. If you’re nearing the edge of the fence but haven’t quite fallen over, check out Adam, our busy realtor. We also want you to meet Nathan, our wealth coach and insurance advisor, and don’t forget about Avalon who owns a marketing agency. Once you’ve landed safely on the other side of the fence and your feet are firmly planted as you declare your readiness to have a virtual assistant join your team, we’ll be ready to join you. We can work together to take all of your “to dos” and help you cross them off your list, one by one.
If we’ve learned anything from our case study theme this year, it’s that all of our clients have a common thread, no matter the kind of business they’re running. These clients all found more time and revenue by working with an expert team of virtual assistants. Ready to fly over the fence? Please reach out; we’d love to hear from you and learn about your business.