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rohan999
Community Member

Client's Feedback

I think clients are becoming more like a dictator. Everything is fine, they are so happy with work and then they make it 4 or below that. I mean, what kind of people are they ??
And moreover freelancers are totaly hepless here. Like how can a freelancer predicts that a all happy client is going to give him a bad feedback ?? Because we are always fair with them. 

18 REPLIES 18
petra_r
Community Member


Rohan S wrote:

I think clients are becoming more like a dictator. Everything is fine, they are so happy with work and then they make it 4 or below that. I mean, what kind of people are they ??
And moreover freelancers are totaly hepless here. Like how can a freelancer predicts


You were not helpless.

Had you taken one look at the client's history and then used your brain, you'd never have worked with that client, ever, and this would not have happened.

 

That client's history SCREAMS "This can not end well!"

 

A freelancer's success is defined more by the clients they had the sense not to work with, than those they did.

florydev
Community Member


Rohan S wrote:

I think clients are becoming more like a dictator. Everything is fine, they are so happy with work and then they make it 4 or below that. I mean, what kind of people are they ??
And moreover freelancers are totaly hepless here. Like how can a freelancer predicts that a all happy client is going to give him a bad feedback ?? Because we are always fair with them. 


Managing client expectations is nearly everything.  You can do good work all day but one misunderstanding can undo all of that.  

 

So far none of my clients have been dicatators, some of them have been almost fearful in their approach, and some are somewhat aloof, and all of them have been human.  Any interaction with another human is colored by our most base instincts, by our lizard brain.  

 

Our lizard brain wants to invariable turn things into simple equations that it can solve with things like: RUN, FIGHT, other F word.  But people aren't as simple as we make them and the bottom line reason you know is you are not that simple.  The client that probably triggered your lizard brain but you probably also triggered things in theirs.

 

Your job, if you really want this job, is to recognize that both your lizard brain and your client's isn't very helpful in a meaningful interaction.  Good projects are mutually beneficial and good clients want you to succeed just as much as you want them too.  You manage a client's expectations by understanding what their lizard brain is telling them and having an answer that soothes the savage iguana.

 

Petra is probably right, because Petra is probably almost always right, and it was a bad client to start with (and their are definitely bad clients).  My problem is you took that interaction and extrapolated it across the board and that is this guy talking:

quincyphone.gif

 

You say you cannot predict what a client will do ... well you better get to a place that you CAN make that prediction.  If your client's are not talking enough for you to understand what is going on then you are NOT talking enough to them.  Communication is the key, otherwise you are just leaving them alone with Quincy the lizard.  And it's going to feed their fears.

 

 

mtngigi
Community Member

I believe it's more about instinct than prediction (but also their history - I had to go look after reading everyone's comments. I would not have touched that client's RFP with a ten-foot pole, especially with this included caveat:

 

"We will provide an additional bonus of up to $10 (whoopee) upon the completion ... bonus is discretionary blah blah blah". All that, on top of a generous $20 budget. No thanks. 

hoyle_editing
Community Member

As Petra said above - look at the client feedback! Personally i would be wary of taking a low budget job from someone with that kind of consistent feedback. (if it was a big well paying job i would maybe take some careful steps towards it though)

 

One thing i have found though, some people will just mark down, maybe fair, maybe not - I have one client (that i have not seen for a while) - low budget small jobs, he was always really happy with the work. But i always got around 4 stars!

In the end i made a point of saying how important feedback and JSS is to freelancers (something i would never usually do) and that if there were any specific things that he didnt feel totally satisfied with, to let me know and i would try my best to resolve those issues. Next feedback was glowing - but still only a 4.x !!!

Maybe because he is on the other side of the world (despite me usually being up late night and in the early hours of the morning and replying to messages) he felt communication was lacking?

Maybe the skill was marked down because he wanted something 'other' than the very specific instructions he had given me.

I dont know, but i have learned that this kind of thing is often seems worse on low end jobs. 

 

ETA - I think Mark makes a good point about communication - especially in any kind of creative design area that is prone to alot of subjective feedback. Something i know i am concious of trying to improve with each contract (though it can be hard with some clients - and this is where only proposing to selcted jobs comes in)

abinadab-agbo
Community Member

I think the solution is for Upwork to tweak the algorithm to make the Freelancer's feedback as important (or nearly as important)  as the client's feedback. It's not presently the case.

freelancers feedback not as important? i dont know if i have misunderstood, but im not sure what you are trying to say. Not sure how that could help?


Jonathan H wrote:

freelancers feedback not as important? i dont know if i have misunderstood, but im not sure what you are trying to say. Not sure how that could help?


Yes. Sometimes you see a 3-star client post a job and he'll quickly get flooded quickly with proposals.

 

Still this client clearly has a history of poor collaboration with freelancers.

Why did this freelancers still apply to their job?

 

Because the algorithm did not make the other freelancer's negative feedback to carry much weight.

 

The algorithm is secret anyway, so I can't explain in specific terms how this will work.

But if Upwork toughens up on client ratings, clients will do everything possible to maintain a great reputation. But they shouldn't toughen it up too much so they don't get discouraged. Just a few notches will do.

OK, i see what you are saying - BUT, i dont think the 'algorithm' makes any difference to how much weight the feedback carries - if a client with poor feedback posts a job there is enough freelancers willing to submit a $5 bid on a $500 job that they dont care about feedback.

 

Feedback is clearly displayed for clients, i always take a look at it - my decision to propose to a job  has nothing to do with an algorithm, its up to me. Same story for a client - they can hire a freelancer with bad feedback if they choose to, though there is enough proposals to most jobs that they probably dont need to.


Abinadab A wrote:

Jonathan H wrote:

freelancers feedback not as important? i dont know if i have misunderstood, but im not sure what you are trying to say. Not sure how that could help?


Yes. Sometimes you see a 3-star client post a job and he'll quickly get flooded quickly with proposals.

 

Still this client clearly has a history of poor collaboration with freelancers.

Why did this freelancers still apply to their job?

 

Because the algorithm did not make the other freelancer's negative feedback to carry much weight.

 

The algorithm is secret anyway, so I can't explain in specific terms how this will work.

But if Upwork toughens up on client ratings, clients will do everything possible to maintain a great reputation. But they shouldn't toughen it up too much so they don't get discouraged. Just a few notches will do.


So Upwork could somehow stop people from being stupid? 

browersr
Community Member

I think in many cases people are so excited to get client interest that they choose to put blinders on and hope more for the good than the bad. You could see a lot of excuse making like the client's previous freelancer was at fault or it was a misunderstanding etc. When you want something bad enough you can rationalize almost anything. The fact is that you cannot legislate this behavior through algorithms nor is it always a matter of someone being stupid. It's a lack of experience coupled with the pressure to pay the bills that drives many people to overlook what they might not if reading about the client from someone else's experience. Look, even highly successful freelancers can take a misstep here for any number of reasons. Those that will be successful though aren't necessarily the one's that avoided bad clients but rather are the one's who learned from their misadventures and made incremental improvements as they moved forward. We really don't need a "system" to rescue us every time something bad happens. We can be more effective if we learn to rescue ourselves once in a while.  


Abinadab A wrote:

I think the solution is for Upwork to tweak the algorithm to make the Freelancer's feedback as important (or nearly as important)  as the client's feedback. It's not presently the case.


It is 100% as important as freelancers make it. There's nothing for Upwork to tweak--if freelancers paid as much attention to feedback as clients do, and if freelancers left honest feedback instead of lying to protect their own reputations, freelancer feedback would have at least as much impact as client feedback.


Tiffany S wrote:


It is 100% as important as freelancers make it. There's nothing for Upwork to tweak--if freelancers paid as much attention to feedback as clients do, and if freelancers left honest feedback instead of lying to protect their own reputations, freelancer feedback would have at least as much impact as client feedback.


I don't think so.

Now let's forget freelancers' public feedback for a moment (clearly, many lie on it).

I don't know how much (if any) impact freelancer's private feedback has on the client's overall star rating.

If it had sufficient enough impact, clients would do everything possible to protect their reputations.

 

But we all know that a 1/10 on the private feedback to freelancer can bring down their JSS by 3 points or more.

In fact from my observations so far, I don't think our private feedback has any impact at all on client's star rating.

 

If it had good enough impact they would be less likely to act like dictators to ANY freelancer at all.

 

Reastically, from Scott's comments, it's clear that the scale can never be perfectly balanced. In fact I don't want it to be perfectly balanced. Clients should have slightly more power in the relationship - they should be in control. The clients have the money. Freelancers need it.

 

But the scale can come close to balanced with a few tweaks.

 

 

robin_hyman
Community Member


Rohan S wrote:

I think clients are becoming more like a dictator. Everything is fine, they are so happy with work and then they make it 4 or below that. I mean, what kind of people are they ??
And moreover freelancers are totaly hepless here. Like how can a freelancer predicts that a all happy client is going to give him a bad feedback ?? Because we are always fair with them. 


Clients aren't becoming more like dictators.  If you feel this way, then you're letting them because you're charging too little for quality, hard work.  

 

And I agree with the others you're definitely not helpless.   You have CHOICES.  Choose to apply or not to apply.  Choose to accept the job or decline.  

 

How to prevent this kind of feedback in the future?

1) Read previous feedback! (as mentioned)

2) If the client haggles, move on.  They will be nightmare clients.  

3) Go with your gut.  If your conversation up to being offered the job is feeling icky, don't take the job. 

 

So there - not helpless at all. 

As a freelancer, the vast majority of my clients have been great to work with, and have left 5-star reviews.
As a client, I nearly always leave 5-star reviews for freelancers. It would take something significant for me to give less. 
That client in the OP's profile has to be among the worst client profiles I have seen. An atrocious history in terms of feedback both given and received. It's clear that the client is a bit of a ****, but you have to ask yourself why you went for the job, Rohan. 


Jamie F wrote:

As a freelancer, the vast majority of my clients have been great to work with, and have left 5-star reviews.
As a client, I nearly always leave 5-star reviews for freelancers. It would take something significant for me to give less. 
That client in the OP's profile has to be among the worst client profiles I have seen. An atrocious history in terms of feedback both given and received. It's clear that the client is a bit of a ****, but you have to ask yourself why you went for the job, Rohan. 


 


I finally had a look; rather ugly client history there.

 

The OP can only hope thay the client's reputation is bad enough for Upwork to discount any bad feedback from that client from his next JSS calculation.

If this happens, then his working with that client can be said to have been a great decision.

If this doesn't happen, I'm afraid it would go down in his freelancing history as a stupid decision.

We need to be careful here when discussing "power and control".  When there is a client/freelancer relationship (i.e. the contract) the power and control must be equal. What that means is that both have the exact same ability to walk away. Ultimately that is the only power that matters. If one side or another feels less capable of walking away, the power dynamic shifts and can then be misused. It is easy to think that the shift would be towards the client, but actually it is often towards the freelancer. Why? Depending on the nature of the job and the cost in terms of dollars and time may be very significant if the client were to try and take it to someone else. Yes the freelancer will give up potential income, but when faced with it, I think that is generally easier given you don't have that income yet where as the client has made a real investment. It will then be the client trying to see the good and overlooking the bad as maybe if they give the freelancer just one more week or say a few more nice words, their investment will have been recovered. 

 

From a platform perspective, it is very clear that the favorite child of Upwork is the client over the freelancer. The client is of course bringing the investment to the platform and any loss of clients is a 1:1 loss in terms of potential revenue. Not the same on the freelancer side as long as someone else can slide in and get that contract started. Clients will always be the more "important" customer of Upwork. Scarcity will ensure that.

 

The real power still lies with people willing to walk away. If a freelancer can evaluate any potential client feeling like it would be okay to walk away, then the client has no real power over them. The freelancer can then look at other reviews, the way in which the job description was written, the content of the interview, etc., to then make an uncoerced decision.  That's the kind of power you cannot outsource to anyone let alone a platform with an understandable bias. 

I think you didn't get it well. I said, if everything is well to go. Like client's previous feedback or his communication, dedication and approach...everything. I mean there is nothing wrong. And when the feedback time, they make it bad. Like I do it with you, you did a great job I also said it was great and then I give you 1 star just simply. What would you do ?


Rohan S wrote:

I think you didn't get it well. I said, if everything is well to go. Like client's previous feedback or his communication, dedication and approach...everything. I mean there is nothing wrong. And when the feedback time, they make it bad. Like I do it with you, you did a great job I also said it was great and then I give you 1 star just simply. What would you do ?


But everything is not well, this clients feedback is really poor so it is not really a comparison....

 

IF the clients feedback was all great, and they had history of leaving good feedback for other freelancers and they left you a less than wonderfull star rating......Then i would be thinking - "what went wrong" the client obviously wasnt totally happy with something. However, this is not the case, the client has abysmal feedback and regulary leaves lower start ratings for freelancers. So it was always going to end this way! I think you need to look at the client more before accepting jobs or going for work if 5 stars is an important thing to you.

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