Amanda warns against hiring $3-an-hour VAs without budgeting for training and turnover. A trained team handles bookings, improves processes, and converts OTA bookings to direct ones. One team member brought prior business experience that made a real difference.
The next question is there is a lot of people in the service accommodation industry that are now starting up virtual assistant businesses and outsourcing businesses. And you see a lot of advice and you guys would have seen a ton of advice being given on Facebook, groups, events and talks and blogs and whatever. What is some bad advice that you see being given in your industry at the moment, specifically around outsourcing? And what would you like to address?
I see a lot of people go and get a VA from the Philippines for $3 an hour. They're really cheap. It's great. Except you've got to train that person. You've got to spend all that time training that person and that person might not actually be suitable for the role and it's only one person. And then they give up, they don't want to do it anymore. So you've got to go and find the next person and you've got to train them up. And at the same time you've still got to run your business. So we, we have an awful lot of people who've gone through their third or their fourth VA and you say to them, look, you know, you kind of get what you pay for. This is a tough business. Hospitality is a tough business. A VA on $3 an hour is great if you want to just get them to research something in your area. No deadlines, no pressure or anything. But if you want them to answer your queries on booking.com or go into your email and answer your queries with good English as well, why would they do that? They can go and get an easier job for $3 an hour. So they leave, they don't want to do it anymore. They disappear, They've gone and you've got to retrain somebody else. You know, with the SA Angels, they've been doing this a long time. They've been trained by me and hardware Harjot's been trained by me. I've been doing this a number of years. We're constantly evolving our systems. We're constantly fine tuning them, we're constantly reacting to any changes in the marketplace. And this is a fully trained team with a lot of experience who knows how to deal with situations. One member of my team, he used to run his own business. He ran a courier firm in Australia for about six or seven years. He only came back to India because he needed to spend time with his family. He will, he will convert a lot of my bookings from booking.com, he will convert them into direct bookings. He will come to me and say, I think I can convert these. I'll say, brilliant, Aman, go ahead, do it. And he does. You know, these are fully trained people that understand the business. They know what to say, they know what to do, they know, they make suggestions to me about problems that they notice common queries from guests or common complaints and they will come to me and inform me what's going on so that we can discuss putting a system in place for it.
I don't suppose you would know just off the top of your head how many bookings that this particular Viha has been able to convert from an OTA book into a diary booking in the last sort of three, four months, would you?
He's converted about 20 because an awful lot of people that come over for the football or the cricket and they will phone them up and they'll just convert. And he also, they also know how to recognise a company booking. They know what a company booking looks like. You know, you've got the address which is a unit five something, something, something. They know that's a business booking. And so when they phone up to check that they, you know, that they're coming, that they know to check Wishbox, to have a look at their own personal guest area, that they know where they're collecting the key from, that he will try and convert bookings then. And he's converted quite a lot. He's made thousands really. And these, these are bookings that quite often come back as well because they get that personal touch from Aman speaking the language.
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