According to study conducted this past April, the market for outsourced virtual assistants to handle areas such as administration, customer service, troubleshooting, consulting, and other venues is expected to exceed $110 billion by the year 2024. This prediction comes as businesses all over the world continue to expand their reliance on remote, online based employees, who handle an ever increasing degree of phone calls, emails, and forum posts by customers.
In part, this trend is growing in popularity due to the noted increase in productivity, and the heightened levels of customer satisfaction, being reported across many businesses, according to surveys. Customer service has come to the forefront as companies compete to distinguish themselves in a growing market of nearly identical products and services. Due to several instances over the past year in which customer had a difficult, and in some cases, terrifying experience while trying to resolve issues, companies across the globe are cracking down on any real, or perceived, violations or inadequacies in their customer service practices.
The trend is anything but shocking, as the study, conducted by Global Market Insights Inc., showed that outsourcing your customer service and other venues to remote virtual assistance saves costs, increases productivity across the spectrum, and leads to overall better customer engagement.
Besides cost, one of the primary factors that has led to outsourcing through virtual assistance has been the decline in workplace productivity, as multiple research articles have shown, due to perceived low wages, poor working conditions, and greed, as mid-level managers and executives line their own pockets, while those working on the “company floor” struggle to afford their bills.
Virtual assistants, because of the remote nature of their work, often work from home, avoiding long commute times and high gas prices, that has sapped the moral from many traditional office workers, and saving office space all the while. While they don’t receive many traditional benefits, healthcare and retirement being among them, these always-online workers have learned to compensate. They workout more since they’re not rushed in the mornings to get to work on time, are more health conscious, and aren’t as infatuated with material possessions as their forebears.
While originally considered a taboo practice, from fear of lost jobs and money that would benefits overseas workers and economies, outsourcing has soared in popularity over the past decade.
While the rise of virtual assistants has grown in popularity, companies have had to trade off their reduced costs and high quality service with the loss of experienced employees in other sectors. In particular, industry and leadership experience, which the Baby Boomer and Generation X employees have developed over decades, is slowly fading from the workplace as these generations retire, or prepare to retire.
What’s more concerning is where their replacements will come from. According to Brett Cenkus, a Texas-based attorney of business, Millenials are eschewing the jobs that companies traditionally use to hire employees, the “my way or the highway” jobs, that require working conditions and hours well past the standard 40 hours. Instead, they are gravitating towards work-from-home, online based positions - and are always on the lookout for better opportunities.
In traditional wisdom, it has been the accepted norm to find a company, start at the bottom, and work your way up the ladder. The newest generation, unwilling to accept that they should be, “Grateful to just have a job,” is largely ignoring that trend - and data shows they’re correct to do so. Statistics show that a brand new hire in a company today has about a 30% chance of making a higher starting salary than an employee who has been there at least five years. The message is clear for people just joining the workforce - get in, get some experience, then get out.
Since most businesses seem either unable, or unwilling, to change their workplace culture and employee benefits structures, the virtual assistance industry will continue to rise, companies will continue to outsource many of their functions, and millenials will continue to work at home in their pajamas as older generations quietly retire to a beach, leaving rows upon rows of empty cubicles behind them.
