EXTREME CAUTION, When making profile updates.

[joekinner]

To my fellow freelancers: Please exercise caution when updating your profile if you have Top Rated or above status. If any of your updates cause your profile not to be 100% complete, upwork WILL remove your Top Rated status and Badge automatically.

PSA:
If you make changes to your profile and get a notification that your status has changed from Top Rated, immediately open a support ticket to get it manually reinstated, before the end of the client review period. Because if you don't, your next payment will be delayed 5 days.

TL;DR
Unfortunately, this also means reinstating the 5-day security "hold" on payments, effective immediately. Even if you correct the profile "completeness" within the review period, their system will NOT automatically update to restore your Top Rated status in that time frame. Furthermore, their customer support is unable to recitify this manually once the payment process has completed. Meaning that if you wait for the system to automatically determine your status and update your Top Rated Status, your payments will be back to normal "delayed 5 days".

The details:
As soon as I discovered this, I immediately submitted a support ticket with Upwork Support. Their support tech replied to me 6 hours later and proceeded to quote the criteria for Top Rated status, and their review of my profile compared to the status. Their own review clearly indicated that I met all criteria for Top Rated.  ( I added the boldness for ease of reading )

 **Edited for Community Guidelines**


I proceeded to reply to the support rep 5 hours later(They replied at ~4am my time) pointing out that I have had earnings in the last 90, 60, 30, 7 days, 3 hours after receiving no response, I proceeded to start another "chat" support session. Keep in mind that your phone support as a Top Rated freelancer is also removed when you lose your Top Rated status. I reiterated the issue and very clearly (admittedly very heated) restated the urgency for me in getting the issue resolved in a timely manner. That support rep was unable to resolve the issue and escalated it for resolution:

 **Edited for Community Guidelines**

After waiting 2 more hours with no response, I initiated another chat session, this time (very heatedly ) reiterating the urgency of the matter for me. After getting a few more canned responses I was able to get to a supervisor. This is the final response I received from the supervisor on the issue:

(To be fair I was laying into their supervisor pretty hard since I had to reach out to support MULTIPLE times to get a response.)
 

 **Edited for Community Guidelines**

[LuiggiR]

Hi Joseph,

I sincerely apologize and I'm very sorry to hear that your experience wasn't positive. We definitely appreciate your feedback regarding the lack of a notification when making changes to your profile, which could lead to the loss of the badge. 

It is by design that when the profile completeness goes below 100%, a freelancer won't qualify for Top Rated and may lose the badge, but I can see how it may not be obvious. I can also see that your concern has been already escalated and is currently being addressed. 

Thank you,

[joekinner]

To be clear its not the loss of the badge that's the issue here. It's the loss of the "perks" that come with that. Especially in tough times like these, us freelancers depend on the income earned through Upwork to be disbursed in a timely and predictable manner. To have that income unexpectedly "delayed" due to simple and innocuious changes, can cause SEVERY fianancial issues for the freelancer. As in my case, causing me to be unable to work due to a loss of internet connectivity, due to the unexpected delay in payment availability, due to not being "Top Rated", due to a simple change to my profile. All of this with NO notice, NO recourse, NO help from support.

[joekinner]

Apparently, "community guidelines" prevent freelancers from sharing negative customer support experiences. So, I will be happy to share the details offline for any that really want to know. In my own words, Support can do nothing for you regarding payment delays due to upworks own internal processes. If their automation results in a delay in payment for you, you are our of luck. And will have to try multiple times, and go through multiple people to receive that response. So in short, support can't help with payment delays.