"Invite(Non-Upwork Member) to Call" button required!!!

[dyumnin]

Yesterday I recieved an invite to interview from the CEO of a 15 year old company, I responded within minutes and we setup a call to discuss the details. The budget was approx 3 months at my current hourly rates.

Things were going good until, the client said, "I dont know the technical details, I will now setup a call with my CTO and we can discuss..."

I dutifully informed him that as per Upwork latest changes we cannot communicate off site until the contract is signed. We decided to invite his CTO to the upwork call.

With most other conferencing platforms, It would have been a simple matter of sending him a dial in number or a link to the call.

Regretfully we were not able to find any such number or link on the call page and the client had to terminate the call with "I will try to figure out how to do this and then ask him to join us".

I have not heard from this client since then 😞

It is possible that the additional time required to figure out how to add the CTO to the call and then for the CTO to actually register on the site and join the room has pushed this contract down on the CEO's list of priority...

It is also possible that they found a contractor either on upworker or freelancer who immedeately shared his phone number and joined the phone call/zoom meet when asked to do so, and the contract went to him....

I would hate it if we lost a 10K+ contract to freelancer.com because the calling app lacked some feature!!!!

Can you make it easier for us to add a Non upworker to a call, At a minimum I would expect the following.

1. A link on the call page where client can type the email id of the person he wants to invite. and the system send an email to that person. Note. The invitee should not be required to register on the portal for joining the call. We are live, waiting for him and waiting 20 min until the person fills up the registration form, verifies his email etc is going to be time consuming.
2. A Dialout feature using which we can directly call the concerned person.

[tinker_bell3]

Hi Vijayvithal,

The dial-in by phone feature is already available and you can check that here. You can also refer to the troubleshooting steps on this help article in case you encounter issues while initiating a call. If you need further assistance, please let us know. 

[dyumnin]

Joanne,

Regretfully for the dial in by phone option, no local number option is available in My Country(India), My clients Country(Australia) or his CTO's country(India)
Given that Most of your technical freelancers are based in Asia, And the technical team of clients are also operating out of India, I would request upwork to prioritize adding India to the list of supported numbers. It needs not be a toll free number,

Till then I would request upwork to consider the two suggestions made by me.
1. Provide a dial-out button on the calling screen. OR
2. Make it easy to invite a person to a room/call without requiring registration. and provide the invite button to call page.