Client not responding after completion of job

[vikas_patel15793]

Hi

I have completed my job now I would like to close my job but client is not responding to my messages.

If I close job from my side then does it affect on my job success score?

Thank you

[yeasir_arafat_13]

Vikas, did you submit your work and get your payments?
And don't close the job before getting paid, because then you won't get the payments.
And even after getting payments don't make a rush let the client end the job and if he/she remains unresponsive,
you can seek upwork support's help, they will send an email in your behalf but no guarantee on the client's response
If the client still remained unresponsive, then Upwork advises you to close the contract to further avoid it affecting the job success score.

[vikas_patel15793]

It's hourly base contract so i received my payment.

[yeasir_arafat_13]

Vikas,
Don't make a rush let the client end the job, wait for him/her to respond and if he/she remains unresponsive,
you can seek upwork support's help, they will send an email in your behalf but no guarantee on the client's response
If the client still remained unresponsive, then Upwork advises you to close the contract to further avoid it affecting the job success score.

[vikas_patel15793]

Client has paused the contract on *12 October, 2018*. Then I did not get
any update from him regarding work so I texted him on *13 Feb, 2019* but
Still not getting any response.

So How many days should wait for him reply?

[gilbert-phyllis]

---

Vikas P wrote:
Client has paused the contract on *12 October, 2018*. Then I did not get
any update from him regarding work so I texted him on *13 Feb, 2019* but
Still not getting any response.

So How many days should wait for him reply?

---

IME when a client pauses a contract (instead of closing it), they anticipate having more work for me at some point. I would NEVER close such a contract. Why make it more difficult for them to continue working with me when they are ready?

[petra_r]

---

Yeasir A wrote:
 if he/she remains unresponsive,
you can seek upwork support's help, they will send an email in your behalf but no guarantee on the client's response

---

Asking Upwork to chase a client to close a contract is utterly unprofessional, and totally unneccessary. NEVER do that. Clients hate being harassed and bothered by freelancers, let alone reported to Upwork. What ludicrous advice.

---

Yeasir A wrote:

If the client still remained unresponsive, then Upwork advises you to close the contract to further avoid it affecting the job success score.

---

What do you mean "further affecting the job success score?" - An open contract with money paid does not affect the job success score.

An open contract without payment affects the job success score equally whether open (for months) or closed by the freelancer without feedback.

[yeasir_arafat_13]

Petra,
A contract which have not any income for a long time does affect the JSS
Read this,
https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/115006097327-Job-Success-Score-Changed

It's pretty clearly written there!

[prestonhunter]

I believe Yeasir is referring to this:

Upwork has always maintained that longer-term contracts can indeed improve JSS.

[martina_plaschka]

---

Yeasir A wrote:
Petra,
A contract which have not any income for a long time does affect the JSS
Read this,
https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/115006097327-Job-Success-Score-Changed

It's pretty clearly written there!

---

Just stop. You are spreading so much wrong information. 

You are suggesting that a longterm contract is bad for JSS, while the opposite is true. 

[prestonhunter]

re: "A contract which have not any income for a long time does affect the JSS"

Martina:

He didn't say this.

He said that a contract with no income can negatively affect JSS, which is an accurate statement.

This is what Upwork's help page state. And I know this firsthand from my own experience with JSS.

Upwork states that long-term contracts with earnings during the past 3 months can improve JSS. I understand that the wording in Upwork's own explanation includes only one statement, and not the mathematically converse statement. But both are true.

Just to be very clear about this:

The way that the JSS function works is that there IS positive credit given for long-term contracts which have earnings during the past three months. And long-term contracts without earnings during the past three months can indeed prevent a person's JSS from reaching 100%.

[petra_r]

---

Preston H wrote:

Just to be very clear about this:

. And long-term contracts without earnings during the past three months can indeed prevent a person's JSS from reaching 100%.

---

Only if nothing was ever paid, or there are too many of them. I have half a dozen without any earnings for way over 3 months and my JSS is and stays at 100%

Vikas, if the client is unresponsive for months on end, just close the contract. Or leave it open. Neither will do you any harm.

[yeasir_arafat_13]

Martina,
Vikas hasn’t anywhere mentioned that his contract is long-term and 3 months old!!!
I have never said long-term contracts!
Idle contracts can affect your JSS which upwork has written on it’s blog article, I was focusing on that.
Stop being so nonsense!

[petra_r]

---

Yeasir A wrote:
Petra,
A contract which have not any income for a long time does affect the JSS
Read this,
https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/115006097327-Job-Success-Score-Changed

---

They do not, unless someone has a huge percentage of such contracts, which Vikas does not.

I can show you people with several DOZEN  long term idle contracts and 100% JSS.

You don't know what you are talking about.

[richard_wein]

Yeasir hasn't quoted any text from the page he linked to, but I suspect he's referring to this passage:

"Your Job Success Score drops when one of the following happens between updates

•  
•  
• Jobs with no earnings or no feedback become counted in your score, either because they were closed or because several months have passed since you received a payment."

This passage is very badly written and unclear. I wouldn't rely on it. In fact I take everything on Upwork's support pages with a pinch of salt.

I do know that I had a job open without any new payments for more than 6 months, while remaining at 100% JSS. All things considered, I believe Petra is correct about this.

[richard_wein]

BTW I've just started a contract with a long term client with the specific intention of leaving it open indefinitely for ongoing support, which might be just the odd hour here and there. It suits him not to have to keep starting new contracts, and I'm hoping it will encourage him to give me more work to do.

[petra_r]

---

Richard W wrote:

I do know that I had a job open without any new payments for more than 6 months, while remaining at 100% JSS. All things considered, I believe Petra is correct about this.

---

I have 6 of them. JSS is 100.%

One of my friends  has over 3 dozen of them, also with a JSS of 100%

That is the problem with people who give advice based on what they think, or look up, rather than what they know.

For some reason Upwork re-wrote this not so long ago, it was actually much clearer previously.

Either way, inactive contracts with money paid don't hurt provided they do not represent a significant percentage or there is a pattern.  Same as contracts without feedback.

[gilbert-phyllis]

---

Yeasir A wrote:
Vikas, did you submit your work and get your payments?
And don't close the job before getting paid, because then you won't get the payments.
And even after getting payments don't make a rush let the client end the job and if he/she remains unresponsive,
you can seek upwork support's help, they will send an email in your behalf but no guarantee on the client's response
If the client still remained unresponsive, then Upwork advises you to close the contract to further avoid it affecting the job success score.

---

This is not true. On an hourly contract, if the hours have been logged properly and the client does not dispute them, the FL will be paid regardless of when the contract is closed. On a fixed-price contract, if the milestone is funded and the work is properly submitted and there is no dispute, the FL will be paid regardless of when the contract is closed.

Yeasir, you should stop answering questions so authoritatively, solely on the basis of what you think you understand from reading the Help material. You mean well, no doubt, but your answers are often erroneous and/or incomplete, which is NOT helpful to inexperienced FLs who may not have the wherewithal to go and read the Help material for themselves. 

[prestonhunter]

I definitely agree that Upwork documentation is not always as clear as we might hope. It isn't always as accurate as we might hope.

This is a good example.

That isn't because anybody at Upwork is derelict in their duties. It's just not easy to maintain 100% accurate documentation which will be properly interpreted by everybody over all the world, and regardless of their level of experience using Upwork, all while these things are happening:

- Upwork's programmers are making changes to the system

- Upwork's customer service representatives and other employees are being newly hired, re-positioned, transitioning elsewhere, and may implement policies differently.

In this, Upwork is no different than any other large organization.

So on the matter of how idle jobs affect Job Success Score: I agree with those who have suggested that that Upwork's official help pages don't reveal everything we might want to know about this, may be confusing, and are not the actual "source" of how the JSS functions. JSS scores are based on an automatically-run algorithm which does not "read" any Upwork documentation pages when it calculates scores.

I think we can all agree that Upwork's documentation encourages freelancers to not maintain open contracts for which there will be no future revenue. Here are some good reasons for this completely aside from any impact idle contracts have on JSS:

- The longer a client is gone, the less likely a freelancer will be able to successfully get the client herself to close a contract and thus guarantee feedback is provided.

- A freelancer with many open contracts may look "busier" than he really is, which may be a disinsentive for some clients to consider them

- The freelancer may prefer her own list of open contracts to be uncluttered.