Silicon Valley’s Global VA Platform – with Roland Polzin of Wing Assistant
Wing Assistant
Derek Gallimore talks with Richard Polzin, co-founder, and CMO of Wing Assistant. Started as a concierge app, Wing Assistant connects offshore talents with small businesses.
In this episode, hear Derek and Greg discuss Wing Assistant as a global VA platform and Roland’s insights on the offshore outsourcing industry.
In this episode, the Outsource Accelerator podcast welcomes Roland Polzin, co-founder and CMO of Wing Assistant.
Wing Assistant
Wing Assistant is a platform that connects small businesses such as startups with offshore talents takes over recurring tasks such as social media management, sales calls, data entry and etc.
Derek and Roland talk about wing assistant products, customers, and services. Roland also gives insights on the outsourcing industry and its inflection point over the next few years.
What Wing Assistant can offer to the world
Wing Assistant is a platform that connects small businesses with top-tier talents. It serves as a tool that “makes the process more efficient, secure, and convenient.”
Per Roland, this would enable small and medium-sized businesses to “scale and grow without the hassle of hiring and administration.”
Wing Assistant started as a concierge app that “would serve busy professionals for them [customers] to get anything on the go.” As lockdown was imposed, the Wing Assistant saw a big shift and took this as an opportunity to “pivot and change.”
The Berkeley UC Berkeley Skydeck accelerator program, an organization that helps start-ups grow faster, plays a significant role in their business growth.
Wing Assistant’s market and core benefit
According to Roland, Wing Assitant has a “very broad customer base” primarily because any small business can leverage its service. Some of their market includes professional services, lawyers from marketing agencies, tech start-ups and consultants, or anyone who has a tedious recurring task.
The platform offers sales calling services that deals more with the back-end processes of sales activities and the general assistant service, including “data entry, basic research, basic accounting task,” and social media management.
Roland explains that Wing Assistant is a mix of project management and task management. He details its different features, including;
- Wink, a video recording tool that enables to share screen and record certain task
- Credentials tool that enables clients securely share details
- Artificial intelligence algorithm that potentially monitors negative sentiment that would flag the message to assistant
- Chat tool, a feature that enables a client to chat with the virtual assistant
The advantage of shifting to remote work
Derek implies that the pandemic had an enormous impact on the working environment in the companies. Roland took this shift as an advantage in their business.
All the available tools they are using, such as Click-Up for task management, their custom-built project management tools, and chat system, make the work more seamless.
Per Roland, remote work helped people “open their eyes and realize” that it is not necessary to be in the office on weekdays. With this, he said people would then consider offshoring.
Roland’s insights on the Outsourcing industry
Derek mentioned that the Philippine-based outsourcing owners are more focused on the Philippine operation itself and slightly less on needs and applications to the clients.
As such, this contributes to questioning the understanding and awareness of people in outsourcing offshoring.
Per Roland, outsourcing offshoring is often “viewed as something that’s only for big businesses,” as with the established call centers. He believes that small businesses don’t seem to realize that “there’s highly educated talent working in [the BPO] industry, specifically in the Philippines.”
Despite that, it is a great challenge to educate people and bridge the gap, especially for small businesses.
Roland still aims to show people “something that they may not have thought about in the right way” and “open their eyes that there’s an opportunity that lay ahead” for them.
Roland expounded that outsourcing offshoring does not necessarily mean that company “would lay off staff and replace someone.” Instead, it can help companies “achieve fast ends and handle all as scalable growth.”
The inflection point of the BPO industry
Derek remarks that it will “take a long time” to get up inflection point in the BPO industry, and this will be only experience after the next 20 years.
Hiring people from a global talent pool instead of geographically constrained talent offers a lot of advantages.
Roland agreed with this, and mentioned that there will be one driving factor why businesses “leverage offshore talent” because of an advantage to being, on the average successful.
He added that it would just “crystallize one of the deciding factors” of the overall business was to resort to outsourcing or offshoring.
For Roland, it does not matter when the talent is based. It is just a matter of leveraging partners with technology and the background to find the best talents for a particular client.
Thus, he said that doing this business appears to be scalable. Roland reiterates that “[offshoring is] a powerful way because it does leverage technology,” and it does “leverage partners over the globe.”
Visit https://wingassistant.com/ to learn more about Wing Assistant and to get in touch with Roland.
Listen to more podcast episodes here:
- Philippine Economic Updates with Greg Wyatt of Philippine Strategic Associates (PSA)
- Philippine Property & BPO Updates with Morgan McGilvray of Santos Knight Frank
- The Future of Global Employment with Futurist Richard Jaimes
- Inside Outsourcing – How Remote Work, Outsourcing & Global Employment is Changing the World
Independent
