I’ve always been a big advocate of outsourcing through the use of virtual assistants. In fact, I wrote about personal assistants back in March and had started using a service called GetFriday. I had some mixed experiences (like sending a birthday greeting when it wasn’t someone’s birthday) and decided the cost was no longer justified.
TimeSvr exceeds my expectations
Out of the blue, as I was thinking I needed to drop my assistant, I received an e-mail from the CEO of TimeSvr. He and I exchanged e-mails a bit. Let me pause and note: I was getting e-mail responses from the CEO faster than my assistant at GetFriday. I decided I needed to give TimeSvr a test run and I’m so glad I did.
Now this post isn’t meant to put down any other services (including the one popularized by Tim Ferriss), it’s to demonstrate how my expectations were far exceeded within my first day of use:
- Web-based task tracking: with other services, you send an e-mail to your assistant and wait for a confirmation. TimeSvr provides you with a dashboard that shows all your tasks with and responses, updates, etc.
- Timeliness of responses: the service has remained small to provide for better quality. Many of the other virtual assistant services have grown far larger than they could handle. I’ve found TimeSvr will get back to me in as little as an hour as opposed to a day.
- Excellent English skills: it was very obvious to me that the assistants excel at the language. Some of my more enjoyable e-mails had been from previous assistants in broken English. I can actually talk to my assistant on the phone now, I couldn’t easily do that before.
- Effectiveness exceeds expectations: every time I get a response from an assigned task I always think “wow, s/he’s good!”. I had to find a replacement kitchen accessory: my assistant placed calls to numerous retailers to find the part, the manufacturer, provided me with the warranty details, etc. I was floored with the level of detail I was handed.
I love assigning a task and getting a call back in an hour or two with my assistant and a customer service representative on the line. “Hello Devin, this is ______, I have ______ on the line with me and they’d like to confirm _________. Okay, thank you, Devin.” Wow. I didn’t even realize you could get someone on the phone from __________.
The best part of TimeSvr is the fact they probably don’t put themselves in the same category of services that I’ve used in the past (which were touted as the best, at the time):
We really don’t compare ourselves to anyone. We just saw a market underserved and decided to fill the void. -Zaki Mahomed, CEO
TimeSvr features
This is a company that “gets it”. They understand the web worker like myself, especially. You have various mediums to submit a task, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.
- E-mail: Sending tasks to the tasks e-mail will automatically get routed and assigned immediately. You can see these tasks appear in your dashboard.
- Skype: Chat with the Skype account to submit a task. If you’re on instant messenger all day, why not?
- Phone: If you’re on the road and need to cancel an appointment just pick up the phone and let them know.
And here’s one of the best features, if you’re a trusting person: complete your profile. Simply fill out your contact details, calendar credentials, authorized credit card number, shipping address, travel preferences, etc. Once you’ve provided all your details, the possibilities for easily assigning tasks open up.
If you don’t want to provide everything up front, then simply include it in the task. I’ve had insurance payments made, online subscriptions canceled. I even “lost” a gift certificate applied to my Amazon account. Within minutes my assistant found which item the certificate was applied to. I thought it had just expired… oops.
Try it for yourself
TimeSvr is far more affordable than any comparable service I’ve found out there. At $69 per month you receive unlimited basic tasks (book a flight, cancel this appointment) and up to 8 hours of extended (or complex) task time. The team is available 24/7 including holidays which exceeds most other service I’ve looked into.
I can’t recommend these guys enough. Go ahead and sign up today. You can try them out for three days, free.
My assistant wrote this post
Just joking. But I did ask them (in the form of a task) what they thought were the three best things about the service. They were “saving precious time”, “really cost effective solutions”, and “privacy control” (with explanations for each). I was impressed and agree. Sorry to disappoint but I really haven’t found anything negative to say about this group.
I’m sure you’ve talked about this in a previous post, but can you give me some specific examples of what you have your virtual assistants do? I used to have a real life assistant and it was the best money I’ve ever spent. But I feel all the tasks she was doing couldn’t be outsourced to a virtual assistant. Please change my mind cuz this sounds awesome!
I’d really like to outsource my apartment cleaning and present wrapping, but I don’t think a virtual assistant can help me with that.
Back to the topic at hand — My initial reaction is, but that’s all stuff I can and should do myself. Yet, it sounds nice to have someone else do it.
Did you find it hard at first to delegate such seemingly simple tasks?
@Danny: I’m looking back through my most recent tasks: contact insurance company, see if I can get a lower rate by removing additional drivers; contact insurance company and pay bill; find replacement part for kitchen appliance; find the job listings pages for various ski resorts (for a blog post) and provide a couple from each; contact Amazon about my expired gift certificate; contact Amazon and cancel my AWS/S3 account; contact Amex Platinum and see if a particular flight is available under a free companion ticket; find me a bunch of cheap picture frames; cancel my MobileMe account and argue with them for a refund; research satellite phone slash T-Mobile plans for international travel to Kena; research warranty information for a ‘waterproof’ camera that broke in the water.
And so on, and so forth.
@Nicole: Sometimes I forget these services are at my disposal. But once I realize it, all those little 15 minute interruptions really add up and it’s cool to have someone else do the legwork. Just finding a phone number or sitting on hold sometimes is painful enough…
great affiliate links:)
Thanks, they just launched affiliates last week. Coincidence!
Hey dreams, I have been looking into virtual assistants a bunch lately. Since you have tried a few, was wondering if you ever looked into this service… http://www.bpovia.com? *IF* they can actually do all the web, graphic, etc. work they claim they can, it would make my life MUCH easier.
According to Alexa:
Bpovia.com has a traffic rank of: 85,488
Timesvr.com has a traffic rank of: 472,765
BPOVIA seems much more popular compare to Timesvr
OK dreams, I’m experimenting to find what I like. Using two VAs already but would like to give yours a shot too. Didn’t you have some affiliated links for TimeSvr on here somewhere… how can I sign-up to try out and make sure you get credit?
I don’t think i’ve used alexa for anything useful once in my life
@Devin – Great review! Thanks.
You mention in one of your replies above that the VA helped with a lot of admininistrative items (insurance, cell phone, etc). How are they able to call these services as you i.e. do they say they’re an assitant to you or are they emulating you?
Thanks,
SP