Frequently Asked Questions

Hiring a remote executive assistant to support you can be the best thing for you, your business, and your family. But people naturally wonder if such a service is really the best fit for them. Listed below are the five reservations we hear voiced most often by potential clients—and how we’ve overcome them one by one:

1.Is the quality of the service good enough?

We’re obsessed with providing our clients with the best service possible! Here are the steps we’ve taken to make sure you’ll feel it on the other end:

  • You'll work with top talent. We only hire the top 1% of candidates. We spend a great deal of time recruiting and testing the right people, training them extensively, and giving them all the resources they’ll need to offer world-class care. This commitment to excellence has enabled us to build a professionally managed distributed team. 
  • All our EAs and specialists are full-time, salaried staff with excellent working English. (Kaplan rating: Advanced/Highly Proficient). We also give all applicants psychometric tests (some approved by NASA).
  • All our EAs receive weekly in-house training and are supported by a quality control manager and a professional management team. 
  • Nothing gets lost in the delegation. We built our AI-powered collaboration platform, MySigrid, with our clients and executive assistants in mind. MySigrid helps the team solve problems and complete tasks collectively, saving them more time individually. MySigrid has a Communications Module where all the communication between our EAs and the clients are centralized. Meanwhile, all requests from the clients are converted into tasks in the Task Management Module. These tasks are managed by the primary EAs but may be delegated to our specialists who have expertise in that specific task. In short, we harness the knowledge and brainpower of our entire organization to give you the best service possible.
  • We built a mobile to-do list app for our clients (a web app is currently being developed). You can use this app to delegate tasks to our remote team. You can also use email/Skype/chat or WhatsApp to communicate with your dedicated EA, and it all still ends up in one place— All of your requests will be noted and delegated efficiently.

 

2.What happens when my dedicated assistant quits or goes on leave?

Even if your dedicated assistant quits or goes on leave, we will still offer you seamless continuity. How? Another hallmark of our service is the Knowledge Base/Client Fact Book Module in MySigrid. This module enables us to provide our clients with an uninterrupted service that never waivers in quality.

Our EAs use the Client Fact Book to capture all the information they’ve gathered about a client (including their unique preferences and task history). As a result, even if the client’s primary EA goes on leave, another EA can step in and provide the same level of service with the same attention to detail. 

What’s more, our services aren’t restricted by time zones or conventional office hours, as we have a backup team that works on critical tasks outside office hours. This enables us to deliver dependable and timely results to our clients. 

 

3.Will I have the right chemistry with my dedicated assistant?

We’ll do our utmost to pair you with the right dedicated assistant. How?

You’ll meet your dedicated assistant before you start working with us. What’s more, your dedicated assistant is hired, trained, managed, and vetted by us.

While chemistry isn’t something we can control, we’ll make sure to always provide excellent customer service and demonstrate empathy.

4.How can I safely share sensitive data (like passwords and credit card information) with my dedicated assistant?

We've made it a point to only work with clients that are willing to use online security vault software to exchange sensitive data with their dedicated EA. It’s the only way we’re willing to work with our clients to guarantee their security and peace of mind.

We rely on 1Password’s security management features to safeguard our clients and their sensitive information. The activity log feature creates an audit trail that accurately tracks all actions and changes within the account. We’re also immediately informed if there are security issues, such as password breaches.

We primarily use 1Password to securely manage our clients’ sensitive information and documents—including their passwords, credit cards, social security numbers, and passports. Whenever we onboard a new client, we set up a number of vaults where the client’s sensitive information and documents are organized and stored. Both the client and their executive assistant have access to these vaults. 

A vault can be dedicated to a specific area of work, such as travel management. Here, the client’s passport details, visa, and other travel-related documents and data can be securely stored. The client can access these password-protected vaults on all of their devices. Moreover, clients can maintain private vaults that only they can access and shared vaults for goals they want their EA to manage.  

5.Do I have enough tasks to delegate to keep my dedicated assistant busy?

 We provide a work-life service to busy individuals—which makes a lot of sense because of the way we live and work today. Our clients’ typical daily to-do list is a combination of business and private/family-related matters. This means our assistants need to act as both executive assistants (EAs) and personal assistants (PAs).

Our subscription pricing model enables us to offer our services to a broader clientele. If you don’t need to hire a full-time executive assistant, you can opt to hire a fraction of an EA, corresponding to a part-time employee. This means our team also services other clients, so you don't have to stress about keeping them busy. So, if for a month or two business is slow, we still keep your dedicated EA busy helping our team service other clients.

We worry about retention so you don’t have to. We built this service to help you free up more headspace, giving you the freedom to focus on the things that really matter most to you.

 

THINGS WE DO FOR OUR CLIENTS

We believe the following things make Sigrid.AI a superior solution for anyone looking for administrative assistance. 

Our Team Structure

The team structure is the secret sauce of Sigrid.AI. Your dedicated EA will always be your point of contact and is responsible for the day-to-day quality of the service we provide you, but in reality, you are being supported by a whole team. This provides the following benefits to you:

 

  • Specialization – when your tasks require unique knowledge or skills, your EA can draw on a group of specialist in areas such as travel management (our travel desk is staffed by travel industry professionals), expense management (done by a dedicated bookkeeper), IT support, research, PowerPoint, social media, CRM management, and more.
  • Delegation – your EA has access to a pool of Associate Executive Assistants, who can take on less complex and time-consuming tasks such as data entry, waiting on calls, etc. This frees up your EA to focus their energy on quality and project management.
  • Continuity – because we have several staff members working with each client, we can offer seamless continuity of service during vacation, sick leave, etc. Should you need a new EA for some reason, we can offer an almost instant replacement with someone who already knows how you like to work. Contrast that with having to go through months of recruitment and training.
  • Flexibility – the Sigrid.AI service can quickly scale up and down depending on your needs because we have a whole team ready to support you, and many of them will be familiar with your requirements already. Just let your EA know, and we will add some hours to your current plan, or move you to a different plan.

Our Recruitment Process and World-class Staff

All our employees are college-educated with excellent working English (Kaplan rating Advanced/Highly Proficient) and a minimum of 5 years of working experience. We hire people full-time, offer above-market compensation and benefits, including healthcare for dependents, so our staff is free to focus their energy on providing an excellent service to our clients. Staff co-work in our office 2 - 3 times a week and receive on-going in-classroom training,

We have spent the past three years refining our understanding of what makes a great remote executive assistant (hint: it is not the same characteristics that make a good co-located EA) and our ability to attract them. Only 1% of applicants make it through our rigorous recruitment process, which combines the latest psychometric testing (one test was developed by NASA) with several rounds of interviews and case-based

Our Management, Processes and Continuous Training

Each is supported by a Customer Success Manager (CSM) and a management team that oversees their work and reinforce quality and standard processes through continuous coaching and weekly, in-classroom training sessions.

This is what we do, and we think we are good at it. Unlike most other organizations, managing and developing administrative staff is the core function of Sigrid.AI. We invest heavily in continuous improvement both in general and at the individual level, which ensures that our service quality is substantially higher and more consistent than other set-ups like ‘normal’ co-located administrative staff, individual remote workers, or even alternative remote staffing companies where staff doesn’t co-work in an office.

Our AI-enabled Software Systems

We’ve spent the past three years developing our MySigrid platform to make our EAs able to efficiently deliver world-class administrative support. A dedicated and secure workspace is set up for each client where

  • All chat and email messages with the client are managed in the communications module, and automatically linked to the relevant tasks
  • All tasks are managed through to resolution with sophisticated tools for collaboration and process management
  • A knowledge-base is continuously expanded of customer-specific preferences and requirements, along with shared, SOPs, checklist, etc

MySigrid uses AI/machine learning to understand the communication from clients in order to assign a task type and make sure all preferences relevant to that task type are presented to the EA just when and where they need it. We have spent the past three years labeling all communications and knowledge-base entries to educate the natural language processing algorithms that enable this. These same algorithms will power our upcoming chatbot functionality, which will support the EAs in their communication with clients.

Please see the Plans page.

Sigrid.AI is committed to ensuring that your information is secure. In order to prevent unauthorized access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, technical, and administrative security measures and safeguards to protect the confidentiality of your personal information.

All our staff have signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) covering the protection of your information and are regularly trained in our Information Security Policies.

Your information is stored in our MySigrid system, which is our custom-built platform for handling all communication and information relating to our clients. MySigrid is hosted entirely on the Google Cloud Platform and takes advantage of the industry-standard security of that platform along with regular vulnerability assessments and penetration testing.

For particularly sensitive information such as passwords, log-ins, and sensitive documents, we rely on 1password a leading secure password management and data sharing solution.

If you request our staff to use other means of transferring or storing information (e.g., Dropbox, Google Drive, Slack, Whatsapp), we will endeavor to set-up and use such systems in accordance with our Information Security Policies.

Please refer to our Privacy Policy for more details. If you have any questions, please contact our Data Protection Officer on dpo@sigrid.ai.

Online hours are the time slot during weekdays where you can have real-time communication with your VA.
 
This is also the time when your VA can participate in meetings, calls, etc.
 
Personal/Start-up Plans select one 4-hour slot and Growth/Enterprise Plans two adjacent 4-hour slots from the following:
  • Asia  12:00-16:00 SGST
  • Europe  10:00-14:00 CET/CEST
  • America East  9am-1pm EST/EDT
  • America West 11am-3pm PST/PDT
The actual resolution of your tasks may happen at any time of day depending on urgency and the skills required.

If your task requires immediate attention inside your online hours, please write the word ’Urgent’ in the subject line or chat text. Incoming voice or video calls will be treated as Urgent. 

If your task requires immediate attention regardless of the time of day (i.e. also outside of your online hours), please always send an email and write ’Critical' in the subject line. These are our response time commitments: 

Priority Response time* When Task Resolution
Normal Within 30 minutes Inside online hours As soon as possible
Urgent Within 15 minutes Insideonline hours Immediately
Critical Within 15 minutes Anytime Immediately
The iPhone app is available to subscribers of the Sigrid.AI remote executive assistant service. It allows you to communicate seamlessly with your EA while providing a structured overview of all the tasks you have delegated to your assistant. We focused on building a tool to supercharge the collaboration between our clients and our remote support team.
 
With the Sigrid.AI mobile app you can:
  • Keep track of all messages between you and your assistant (including emails)
  • See all task-related communication in one place
  • See detailed information about the tasks you have delegated, including deadline, priority and real-time status
 
You can find the iPhone app on the App Store. An Android version will follow. 

Your EA will be servicing you through MySigrid, our AI-powered collaboration platform built specifically for executive assistants. MySigrid contains your confidential Client Fact Book (CFB) and all tasks and related communication. 

The MySigrid platform enforces standard processes for the handling of different task types, thus improving quality, reducing human error and increasing speed.

Our Team structure ensures versatility and continuity:

When you sign up for the Sigrid.AI executive assistant service you get access to the expertise and experience of a whole team:

  • a dedicated Executive Assistant (EA), set up as an employee of your company, is your single point of contact and who will be responsible for resolving your tasks and meeting your day-to-day requirements,
  • a team of specialists who support your dedicated EA in areas such as travel management, expense management, IT support, research and more,
  • one or more Associate Executive Assistants (AEAs), focused on supporting the EA in supporting you. AEAs are aspiring EAs, have been through the same demanding recruitment process and receive extensive classroom and on-the-job training,
  • a Customer Success Manager (CSM) that oversees the work of your dedicated EA, conducts continuous training to ensure adherence to standard procedures and functions as a back-up to guarantee seamless continuity

Aside from turning your EA into a Swiss Army knife that is continuously adding new capabilities, the team structure, and our MySigrid platform also ensure continuity. When your EA takes time off, someone else can take over the role of managing your tasks without the service missing a beat. All you will notice is that someone else is writing to you 'on behalf of' your EA. Since you are being serviced by an aggregate person rather than one dedicated person, the team structure means that at any given time, your EA will be supporting multiple clients.

I ask my remote assistant to manage my Outlook calendar

  • To block my calendar upfront,
  • Reach out and schedule meetings and other events with my remote team, new applicants, potential investors, business partners, etc.,
  • Manage mine and my wife's shared calendar, and
  • Manage the schedule I share with my daughter.

My whole life is reflected in my Outlook calendar. When you travel a lot to different time zones, it can get confusing, so here it is invaluable that your assistant keeps you updated at all times about meetings, flight-departures, events, etc.

I ask my remote assistant to manage my receipts and process my travel expenses

  • Manage my receipts,
  • Process  my travel expenses,
  • Prepare bi-monthly expense reports,
  • Log expenses against agreed dates, and accounting codes.

I send a photo of the receipt to my remote assistant when I pay for something, and then I sign off on the expense report on a bi-monthly basis. My assistant has access to my calendar, so I have asked her to log my expenses against agreed dates in my calendar and approved accounting codes. 

Plan and schedule ground transportation options from point A to point B

  • Estimate transportation time and blocks my calendar upfront,
  • Find and evaluate transportation options,
  • Suggest means of transport

This is especially handy when I travel to new cities. 

Book hotels, Airbnb’s, and rental cars

  • Compare prices,
  • Recommend and book hotels, Airbnb's, and rental cars both for business trips and family vacations.

Manage my schedule proactively, and to continuously plan, block and schedule meetings and events ahead of time in my Outlook calendar

  • Reach out via email,
  • Coordinate meetings,
  • Block my calendar,
  • Schedule,
  • Manage cancellations, and
  • Reschedule meetings and events.

It's not just meetings with clients. It's business meeting travel dates, my daughter's dance lessons in London and her exams, weekly catch-up calls with my remote team, doctor's appointments, my yoga classes, guitar classes, haircut, barbershop, etc.

Help me file my VAT

  • as well as manage light bookkeeping for me

We use Xero.

Remind me of recurring meetings and events

  • I.e., my daughter's school schedule, scheduled exams, when I am needed in attendance at the school, her singing performances throughout the year,
  • Birthdays,
  • My employee’s anniversaries,
  • Doctor’s appointments,
  • Names of the children of people I meet, and their birthdays. 

Stuff, I would love to remember.

Purchase airline tickets

  • I ask my EA to find and recommend flights for me,
  • To manage the booking,
  • Check me in,
  • Make sure I get my preferred seat on the plane every time,
  • Manage upgrades and lounge access,
  • Manage loyalty programs,
  • Manage rebooking for me, as well as
  • Manage cancellations and reimbursements.

She saves all the booking details in my calendar every time, so I always have all the travel documents and details saved in one centralized place.

File and save scans of important documents for me in my Client Secure Vault in 1Pasword

Some documents are essential when you travel for business. I always make sure to have access to these documents in my 1Password app on my smartphone, i.e.:

  • A copy of my Passport,
  • A copy of my Visa,
  • Virtual debit cards and payment details,
  • Details about loyalty programs,
  • Booking details for everything from flights to hotels, cars, events, etc.,
  • Even documentation about stuff I have purchased online.

Research stuff for me online

  • Compare prices on items,
  • Manage orders,
  • Manage the shipment of, i.e., books on Amazon.

I love to read.


Manage online subscriptions and memberships

  • I ask my remote assistant to keep an eye out on online memberships,
  • To keep them current,
  • Remind me to sign off on memberships, subscriptions, and apps in time if I haven’t used them for the last six months,
  • Renewal of memberships, or
  • Subscribing to new memberships and subscriptions.

For this, I use a Virtual Debit Card from Sigrid.AI.

Set up conference calls

  • Manage new and recurring meetings and events with my remote team, new clients, existing clients, business partners, and applicants.

We use Zoom. I find it to be the best conference call software on the market right now.

Coordinate and schedule interviews with new applicants

  • I ask my remote assistant to screen candidates,
  • Create shortlists,
  • Book a slot in my calendar for interviews, and
  • Set up conference calls.

We use Workable to communicate about candidates; it's super smart when you are collaborating as a remote team, and I can do it while I am traveling via the app on my iPhone. 

Reminders

  • Remind me of events, anniversaries, appointments, dinner dates, parties, my godchildren's birthdays, my employee's anniversaries, etc.

All the essential stuff that shows you care while being away a lot of the time.

Things we do for our clients

We do a million and one different things for our clients every day. As long as you need it, it's legal and manageable remotely; we are happy to handle it for you. The list provided is non-exhaustive and meant to inspire you to offload your whole To-Do List. Read more and get inspired here.

We are a work-life service solution. We think it makes more sense to the way we live and work today. Our clients use our assistants as both executive assistants and personal assistants. 

We do a million and one different things for our clients every day. As long as you need it, it's legal and manageable remotely; we are happy to handle it for you.

A typical To-Do List is a mix of both work-related tasks and also private family-related matters.

The list of things we do for our clients is non-exhaustive and meant to inspire you to offload your whole To-Do List.

Read more here to get inspired.

Book a consultation

During the 20-minute discovery call, we will talk you through;  

  • how the service works,  
  • the most suitable subscription plan for your needs, 
  • how we use technology to deliver better service quality, and 
  • how we are different from freelancers and other virtual assistant services. 

Book a free consultation here.

 

Get a 14-day free trial

We run the free trial on our MySigrid Assistant To-Do-List app (iOS), custom-built for delegating tasks to our remote team of assistants and specialists.  

You get five free tasks (we consider a task approx. 20 minutes of work) and support from our team of shared assistants and specialists.  

When your trial ends, you can buy more tasks or upgrade to one of our dedicated VA plans. 

During the trial, we will demonstrate to you:

  • How well we communicate,
  • How we manage a task in the same structured way every time,
  • The level of complexity we can handle,
  • Our level of precision, 
  • Our time-management skills, and
  • Our overall responsiveness.

When the trial is done, you can choose to buy more tasks per month (5, 10, or 25) or upgrade to one of our dedicated VA plans.

Android users: If you have an Android phone, you can either sign up for our waiting list here or get in contact with us, and we will set up a trial of our dedicated VA plans for you (Email/Skype/Chat/Local Telephone).

Book a free trial here.

 

Request a Quote

When you request a quote from us, we ask that you provide us with detailed information about yourself and your needs for support by filling in a short questionnaire. This enables us to figure out the right service setup for you and make sure that our services fit your needs.

We will send you a customized quote for our services within one working day. 

Contact Sales

Contact Support

Get a 14-day free trial

We run the free trial on our MySigrid Assistant To-Do-List app (iOS), custom-built for delegating tasks to our remote team of assistants and specialists.  

You get five free tasks (we consider a task approx. 20 minutes of work) and support from our team of shared assistants and specialists.  

When your trial ends, you can buy more tasks or upgrade to one of our dedicated VA plans. 

During the trial, we will demonstrate to you:

  • How well we communicate,
  • How we manage a task in the same structured way every time,
  • The level of complexity we can handle,
  • Our level of precision, 
  • Our time-management skills, and
  • Our overall responsiveness.

When the trial is done, you can choose to buy more tasks per month (5, 10, or 25) or upgrade to one of our dedicated VA plans.

Android users: If you have an Android phone, you can either sign up for our waiting list here or get in contact with us, and we will set up a trial of our dedicated VA plans for you (Email/Skype/Chat/Local Telephone).

Book a free trial here.

 

REQUEST A QUOTE