One Emotional Rating from a Small Contract Ma...

lnghng · ‎09-28-2020

I was a top-rated plus developer with over 100k earned and 2500+ Upwork hours. I did so well, I even received a $12k bonus from one of my happy clients. My JS score was 100%. But recently I had done a 1k fixed-price project which required to provide the documentation for the technical design of integration of a third-party API into a Shopify store. Close the work to be done, my client asked me to write the real code for them. I told the client I must get paid for the additional work to build the Shopify App. The client didn't say one word of complain on the design work I submitted to them, but since I refused to do the additional work, my client was not happy. Soon after the contract was closed, my JSS score dropped from 100% to 92%. Two weeks later it dropped further to 86%. I lost Top-rated plus status.

The $1k is a very tiny portion of my past six months of earnings. No matter how much a freelancer has achieved in the past, one emotional client can totally destroy the freelancer’s Upwork career he/she built for months or even years.

I posted the topic yesterday night, received one response, but I couldn't find it now. Got deleted?

Anyway, the person who kindly replied to me mentioned that a top-rated contractor had two weeks to delete a bad rating. But it requires I have at least 10 contracts! This is another issue I am facing. My past clients kept on giving me tasks. They liked my work, and I have trouble leaving a contract. When I left my first client, he didn't want to close it. Seven month later, he went back to give me a bad rating despite I had received numerous praises from the company. I lost my top-rated status. It took me 4-5 months back to the top-rated status.

After that big trouble, I decided to also look for work outside of Upwork. I got a project outside, and had to close one of my contracts to free time. Despite I tried my best to make the project smoothly transfer to their new hire, my client was still not happy about my leave. I lost my Top-rated badge again.

Anyway, I ended up with very few contracts with very high per contract hours. This is obvious a sign of customer satisfaction. If a freelancer didn’t do a good job, how can his/her clients continue on paying him/her to do more work?! But no matter how long a freelancer has worked on a project, for Upwork’s JSS score, if on the day of closing the contract the client is not happy, he/she can punish the freelancer to plummet the JSS score, and all the good work the freelancer has done on that project would count nothing!

BojanS · ‎09-28-2020

Hi Linghong,

You can find your previous post here and under your Community profile here.

I checked and can confirm that your score is calculated correctly. There is a number of factors that go into the calculation. Please note that because the score is calculated over 6-, 12-, and 24- months windows, changes in the score may be not due to recently closed contracts but because older outcomes fall off the calculation or because the windows that provide the score that's shown on your profile changed. I will not be able to share specifics about how and by how much such contracts affect the score.

The good news is that it's entirely possible to improve the score by delivering great results on your current and future contracts.

Happy Working!

~ Bojan

abinadab-agbo · ‎09-28-2020

Linghong C wrote:
But it requires I have at least 10 contracts!

Oops. One reason why you should close and reopen contracts every now.

Your Top Rated is of minimal value if your kind of Top Rated cannot afford you the perk when you need it.

Anyway, if you have that one large client close out with a top rating, you'll have a jump in the JSS.

But I don't advise you pester the client to close out because that would be a very reactionary and anxious thing to do. Your approach to closing and reopening contracts should be proactive and systematic, not reactionary.

At any rate, the best time to ask a client to close out and possibly reopen is after delivery of the most recent milestone, not from the middle of nowhere.

yitwail · ‎09-28-2020

Linghong C wrote:

I posted the topic yesterday night, received one response, but I couldn't find it now. Got deleted?
Anyway, the person who kindly replied to me mentioned that a top-rated contractor had two weeks to delete a bad rating. But it requires I have at least 10 contracts!

Linghong, I wrote that response but I was mistaken about the 10 contracts requirement. It's 10 contracts after the previous removal, but for the first removal, the number of contracts doesn't matter. So good luck with the removal, but do remember that JSS is the maxiimum of the 6, 12, and 24 months JSS, so it's possible removing an earlier feedback with lower rating and higher dollar amount may be more beneficial.

__________________________________________________
"No good deed goes unpunished." -- Clare Boothe Luce

abinadab-agbo · ‎09-28-2020

John K wrote:
Linghong, I wrote that response but I was mistaken about the 10 contracts requirement. It's 10 contracts after the previous removal, but for the first removal, the number of contracts doesn't matter. .

Thanks for clarifying this, John. Upwork can be so legalistic I didn't notice this one lol.

The OP can go ahead to use their perk 😉

John K wrote:
it's possible removing an earlier feedback with lower rating and higher dollar amount may be more beneficial.

Yes, but if I were the OP, I would remove the most recent negative outcome as older negative outcomes are about to fall out of the calculation windows anyway.

lnghng · ‎09-29-2020

Abinadab A wrote:
Yes, but if I were the OP, I would remove the most recent negative outcome as older negative outcomes are about to fall out of the calculation windows anyway.

Hi Abinadab,

Thank you for your suggestion. Your idea of considering the time window when removing the bad one is very valuable.

lnghng · ‎09-29-2020

John K wrote:
Linghong, I wrote that response but I was mistaken about the 10 contracts requirement. It's 10 contracts after the previous removal, but for the first removal, the number of contracts doesn't matter.

I really appreciate the solution you gave to me. Upwork’s feedback page mentioned that “Requests may only be made every 3 months, and after 10 or more completed contracts from the time you submitted your previous request”. https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/219801228-Feedback-Removal

They should update it to provide the correct information that the first removal dosen’t need 10 contracts.

One Emotional Rating from a Small Contract Made My JSS Dropped from 100% to 86%