Perssist is a virtual assistant service that’s part human and part technology.
Over time, Perssist learns user preferences and becomes more integrated into users’ daily routines via personalization technology. Various existing and upcoming third-party app integrations help Perssist work directly with the tools you are already in the habit of using.
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About Perssist
The New York-based company was founded in 2014 by Evan Britten-Bozzone and Albert Wang. Their virtual assistants are located all over the world to ensure coverage in every time zone.
Per Evan, “Location of workers is not as important to us as ability. We hire less than 3% of the people that apply for an assistant position, after filtering them through an intensive multi-round interview process. For the few that do get hired, we put them through a rigorous training process. We have accomplished overseas workers that have earned Bachelor’s degrees, and in some cases Master’s degrees.”
He explains that the company aims to provide busy people with a channel to outsource all the time-consuming and undesirable tasks that could be taken care of by an intelligent and tech-savvy virtual assistant.
How it Works
Perssist brings on-demand access to a virtual personal assistant to do the bidding of busy people and entrepreneurs everywhere.
Users submit requests via web, email, or phone, and Perssist gets started on them in short order. Perssist offers a new level of convenience, with a service that’s flexible enough for a 10 minute phone call or 10 hours of event planning.
When you submit a request to Perssist, an assistant will check-in with you after 20 minutes, which prevents assistants from spending too much unnecessary time on a request and makes sure everyone is on the same page.
Services
Perssist virtual assistants can make calls, do research, make appointments, or do a variety of other remote tasks.
Each request is routed to the right assistant for that task. Whether it’s web research, calling customer service or local stores, scheduling, finding local services, helping with travel planning, editing WordPress, or anything else that can be handled remotely by a smart and tech-savvy assistant.
To be more specific about what Perssist does and does not do: “Anything an intelligent, Internet-savvy liberal arts major with a long-distance calling plan can do, we can do.” So nothing too technical or requiring professional training like coding or accounting.
Evan says the requests they’ve received so far have been about 40% business-related and 60% personal.
“In the near future,” he adds, “We’ll be able purchase items on a users’ behalf without sharing sensitive payment information.”
Plans and Pricing
Perssist offers 3-tiers of pricing plans, ranging from 2 hours a month at $28 ($14/hr), to 15 hours per month at $150 ($10/hr).
New users can take advantage of a 1-hour free trial.
Perssist charges time in 5-minute increments, and your unused hours and minutes roll over to the next month.
Perssist Alternatives
Although Perssist doesn’t wave the “All-American” flag like Fancy Hands, the services are similar — an on-demand virtual assistant service. However, with the hourly plans instead of the by-the-task plans, Perssist allows for greater flexibility in what you can delegate, even accounting for Fancy Hands’ new multiple-task requests.
The other company that comes to mind is OkayRelax, which connects you with a dedicated VA for an affordable monthly membership fee.
Have your worked with Perssist? If so, please share a quick review of your experience below to help others with their decision.
Perssist is great at tasks that are research-oriented, like grabbing information on a topic, travel planning, email gathering, etc. What it’s not good for is technical stuff like web design and if you want a virtual secretary on call whenever you would like. Perssist has been great so far and the quality of their work is a lot better than some of the other VA services I’ve tried these past few years.
Perssit’s Terms of Service are not great, especially for anyone concerned with privacy or confidentiality. They say that you use the service “at your sole risk.” They “disclaim all warranties of any kind.” That’s right: ALL warranties of ANY kind (!). And whatever promises they might seem to provide in the Terms of Service are subject to change without notice. And to top it off, they say you will be deemed to have accepted the unannounced changes to the Terms if you continue to use their service, even if you didn’t know about the changes. They write: “We reserve the right to update the Website and these Terms of Service from time to time, at our discretion. Your continued use of the Website following the publishing of updated Terms of Service means that you accept and agree to the changes.” Note that there’s no promise you’ll be informed of any changes, which is pretty bad. Most companies at least say they’ll notify you. Full Terms of Service are here: https://www.perssist.com/terms-of-service
Perssist has been a dependable backup for me. I find their plans to be affordable, and the results have been good to excellent.
Like Fancyhands, Perssist also keeps completed tasks on the dashboard, so you can reference them later if need be. Recommended.
So far so good. The CEO is very responsive and I’ve been happy with the work done.