Why Byron Provides Both On Demand Assistants & Dedicated Assistants

After talking with countless companies, cost savings is the biggest reason why people choose to hire a virtual assistant. If you don’t have the funds to hire a full-time in house assistant, leveraging a remote assistant is definitely a smart move. Anyone can talk about why it’s smart and cost effect move to use a virtual assistant, but what most people don’t often highlight are some of the downsides of hiring a virtual assistant.

Before we started Byron, we interviewed 30+ startup founders who utilized virtual assistants and we asked them some of the things that they would improve with the current virtual assistant that they worked with. The common theme among these companies was that they wanted their virtual assistant to be more responsive when they sent over a tasks.

Most people understand that most virtual assistants have other clients to deal with, but they don’t always like the typical 2-5 hour delay in getting a response. Most virtual assistants have between 3-10 clients to tend to per day or per month, which typically accounts for that delay in responding.

To some companies, this slower response time with a part-time virtual assistant isn’t a big deal - you simply create a schedule or send your virtual assistant non-urgent tasks and everything is very predictable and good!

But what happens when you need to find that balance between speed and consistency?

Byron’s solution to this gap in response times is to provide both short-term on-demand assistants and long-term dedicated assistants that scale to your needs.

For example, by utilizing Byron you can have a dedicated data entry assistant and also an on demand team of researchers ready to get your tasks done within a matter of a couple of hours. By having both of these models under one platform we’re able to meet both needs. Here’s a quick breakdown of how it works.

Short-Term Assistants

Our short-term assistant feature is synonymous with an “on demand” assistant model. The way this feature is structured is pretty similar to an Uber-like model. When you take an Uber you first select what kind of car you would like and then hit “Submit” and you’re placed with the nearest driver.

For our short-term assistant requests we first ask you to categorize the request - for example, do you need a research assistant, transcription assistant, etc… then you hit submit. Immediately after you hit submit we parse your request out to the best categorized assistant for the job that is available immediately to work for you. The great thing with this is that you will get a response within an hour or two and your task will be completed within 24 hours. Due to the short-term model, if you send something like 5 tasks to our platform at once it will most likely go 5 different virtual assistants. We have also built in things like rules and integrations to help you cut down on the amount of time that it takes for you to send out requests. Short-term requests are prefect for requests that don’t require much background information and/or training.

Long-Term Assistants

Short-term assistants are great for when you need things done quickly and the assistant doesn't need much background information about your company. But, what about projects that last months or you need to train an assistant on a certain process within your company? That's where Byron's long-term assistants come in.

Byron's long-term request feature allows you to have a dedicated assistant added to your team that is specialized to your needs. What’s great about this feature is that you can hire someone for as low as 5 hours per month and you don’t have to jump through any hoops to do it.

We video interview all of our assistants and also subject level test them so we’re always placing you with a perfect match. When you request a long-term assistant we ask you what tools you need them to know and we use matching algorithms to place you with the top match. We also ask you what days or the week and times you might need the assistant to help cut down on those slower response times.

Recap

Roughly 70% of our clients use both short-term and long-term assistant models within our platform. Everyone has different needs - take a look at all of our use cases here to get a sense of what tasks and model or models are right for you.