Hiring remote executive assistants has become a popular strategy for businesses looking to bump up their productivity, and not just through admin work—many companies hire EAs specifically to boost growth through lead generation, customer support, and other stages of the customer journey.
In this article, we’ll explain how you can grow your business with executive assistants by assigning them specific tasks in the customer journey. This doesn’t necessarily mean the entire process, of course: we’ll go over the roles an assistant can play at different stages in the journey. From there, you can decide where an EA best fits in your business’ own strategy for ramping up.
- The customer journey spans the entirety of a person’s relationship to your products, services, or brand, from first hearing of it to becoming a user or client.
- Many businesses contract executive assistants specifically to boost growth by providing support at specific points in the customer journey.
- EAs excel at handling routine work that requires a degree of adaptability, business experience, or communication skills.
The Customer Journey
The customer journey represents the different stages of a customer’s relation to your business. It starts before they become a customer (that is, when they’ve heard of your products or services but haven’t bought anything yet), and continues into their connection after that first buy.
The terms may differ, depending on who’s talking about it. This guide will focus on these stages:
- Awareness/Consideration: This is when someone hears of what you’re selling, and begins considering it as something they might want or need. An assistant can help you nudge more people toward your products, services or brand.
- Onboarding: This step involves ensuring your customer is properly set up with what they bought from you. This could mean getting it installed properly, having an account set up, or understanding a product or service’s uses. An assistant working in this stage can streamline processes, or provide personalized guidance to new users.
- Engagement/Retention: The goal of this stage is to increase lifetime value by encouraging repeat purchases or upsells. Assistants can assist with routine tasks in this stage, or provide personalized support to high-value clients.
Awareness/Consideration: Delegate to Bring Leads In
Businesses often hire assistants to handle routine lead generation tasks in large volumes, freeing up their in-house specialists to focus on complex work, or on building relationships with prospects and clients.
Lead Generation
You can have an assistant handle outbound lead generation through various channels.
- Cold Calls: Assistants can use virtual diallers and CRM software to call leads around the globe. With a standard script to follow, they can manage several calls each week.
- Social Media: You can have an assistant connect with possible leads through social media.
- LinkedIn: Your assistant can search for leads based on shared backgrounds, affiliations or industry. If you subscribe to Sales Navigator, they can use this to further refine their search.
- X/Twitter: Following other users to get a follow back is a common tactic on X. Your assistant can monitor activity on your post, or in relevant hashtags or topics, and follow potential leads.
EAs can also help fill out lead information in your CRM (or other databases). Give your assistant a database or contacts list, and they can:
- Look up missing contact information for each lead
- Verify that the information is correct or updated
- Validate data and ensure standardized formatting
- Merge duplicates and delete invalid entries
Sales Appointments
An assistant can help set and coordinate appointments between your team and potential clients. An EA with access to the team’s schedules can send out meeting reminders that include the time and venue, as well as materials to prepare or other reminders related to a lead.
On top of that, any time a lead needs to reschedule, your assistant can handle the work of finding another time. They can also reach out to leads who miss appointments, ensuring none of them fall off your sales funnel.
Onboarding: Get the Perfect Intro to Your Product
An assistant can help you run through or document your onboarding processes, so that you can improve them over time, until you find the most efficient path to getting your users to activation, where they can experience the value of their purchase.
Documentation and Setup
You can have your assistant handle (or observe) the onboarding process, whether that means guiding a new user through account creation, or having them accomplish their first task (e.g. listing an item, starting a project, or creating a view or database).
Your assistant can document this process, providing clear steps that others can follow in the future.
They can also watch for problems or challenges, such as:
- Common points of resistance or confusion with wording, UI, etc.
- Friction in the medium of onboarding (emails, voice/video call, etc.)
- Edge cases, like problems with an OS, software, or conflicting plugins
Once these are resolved, your assistant can add the solution to the onboarding documentation and update any outdated steps.
The data your assistant collects across various onboarding sessions can also be used later on to review the process as a whole.
Engagement/Retention: Delegate for Lifetime Value
Your assistant can also provide support with past or current customers by resolving issues, encouraging upgrades, and otherwise managing their accounts.
Customer Support
An assistant can process support requests, either by screening and routing tickets to the right people, or by responding to inquiries themselves. Give your EA access to your helpdesk portal, or to your company’s support inboxes, and they can keep tabs on all CS tickets and requests.
Upselling and Premium Services
Executive assistants can also support efforts to get customers into higher-value purchases.
One way to do this is to have an assistant monitor customer activity, and then try to upsell them at opportune moments. They can keep tabs on clients through your CRM, or automate your ecommerce platforms to suggest upsells based on past user actions.
Alternatively, you can have assistants serve as account managers to clients on premium services. Much of the work involved here fits the typical EA profile—executive and admin support, adapted to their specific needs—so taking on this work would require minimal adjustment.
Improve Your Customers’ Journey with Magic
Magic can find you executive assistants to help drive your company’s growth. Our screening process is designed to identify candidates with the traits most crucial to success in an EA role, and which are tied to long-term success.
Better still, when you get assistants through Magic, you’ll get access to several support features, including a 24/7 support team, and an account manager to help you monitor your assistants’ activity.
Let us know what sort of roles you need an EA to handle, and we’ll find the right candidate for you.
