Good day everyone,
so my today's message is for the Upwork tech support team, and everyone responsible for making the platform better.
I've been a registered user of this platform for a year now and now can surely say that this platform lacks statistics. What do I mean? I mean some actionable stats which can help us (freelancer) to be a better seller (because not all of us know how to "sell" oneself). We write tons of proposals, and most of them (for me, for example) singing down somewhere and I never get a response or adequate information whether it was the price which didn't meet the client's criteria or something I wrote, or else, and he simply scrolled past my proposal.
I want to ask for some improvements to be made in this area: we can't see who exactly wrote to a customer, who is the customer (unless he responds back), etc. This makes bidding process harder. Not having any stats on your proposals, click-through rate, open rate, read rate, etc. also makes it almost useless to try to write "better proposals" since you don't know whether the client even saw your proposal or not.
Saying somebody checked my profile and how many times exactly + updating this stats to a weird, unknown algorithm which doesn't make any sense is not enough. I ask you to add more transparency to our work since we all want to be better, improve our skills, and write better proposals.
It's also a big question to me how Upwork presents my proposals to the clients. - the question which has never been answered before properly. I guess it works exactly like Google's algorithm, so let's say your proposal comes fourth or fifth in the list of all proposals, and this would mean you'll get a chance to have a click in rare proportion, since 60+% stop on the top three positions (results). I want this to be explained to me. I know that there are keywords, my rating, some other stuff that comes into the calculation, and based on which I get my position within the list of proposals.
I want more transparency and if possible, to know (and this takes a little) - just NAME of a person I'm writing to. I know I can pull it from the feedback section (sometimes), but you could've provided it beforehand not giving away too much data.
Thank you for understanding, and I hope other people will support my message.
Alena Fedorova
