PeoplePerHour Support
A freelancing platform runs primarily with a strong Customer Support team. By 'Customer', generally, both freelancers (or sellers) and clients (or buyers) are meant. Both of them pay to the platform for its functionality and support. Therefore, the success and continuation of a platform are strongly dependent on the satisfaction of both sellers and buyers. However, I have been continuously observing that PeoplePerHour support has been downgraded, if not completely shut down as I fear.
I have two support tickets as seller pending for several weeks (~2 months). As a buyer, I submitted a ticket today and received a generic response (most probably generated by AI). My specific question was not even read despite 3 follow-up efforts. Every time, I added clarification and requested to respond to specific queries but I received generic responses. This is quite annoying and I fear that this would make buyers go away from this platform. Also, if you don't keep sellers satisfied, they will move away to other platforms.
I request the community to upvote this post, share their own experience, and raise their voices to keep this platform active. Likewise, I request PeoplePerHour management to be professional and keep this platform sustained; a lot of people rely on it for breadwinning.
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Yes, I agree, Shahbaz. The level of support on this site is extremely poor. When freelancers do submit a general plea for help on this page it is met with a generic 'raise a ticket' answer instead of a simple way of addressing their issue. The chat function has been disbanded, meaning no instant answers to queries.
This is just not sustainable. Freelancers can't wait weeks for an answer on top of the two weeks' payment time. Clients are just not staying - that's evidenced by lack of projects from those who always used to post.
In a global cost of living crisis, PPH need to work harder for everyone's sake. They are shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring these points, and bringing everyone down with them. Come on PPH, please do something tangible to help us all.
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Thanks, Nancy, for adding more points. Yes, the chat was really very helpful which has now been completely disabled. PPH is an amazing platform with many USPs (Zero Service Fee Scheme, reduced fees with long-term clients as you earn more, and so on). We really want it to remain here, thrive, and not die like Guru, SuperTasker, or get captured by someone else (like oDesk and eLance almost died when Upwork emerged and acquired them).
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Farhanaz, could you not have posted this under a new Section or on a previous post asking for application, rather than hijack this thread? The probable answer to your question is that PPH is full, not accepting any more freelancers for the time being and you'll have to reapply in three month's time, but this thread is really for us to add our voice to PPH to keep this site functioning well.
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@Shahbaz. I posted a project at 5pm today. It's now 10.20 and it's still under moderation. Heaven forbid I wanted to pay extra for an urgent project. Useless, there are no staff here at all. Five hours under moderation! I could have done this work myself three times over. It's getting cancelled in the morning with a harsh email to PPH. Do they want people to work here or not?
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Hi Nancy,
That's really sad. I was in an assumption that People don't post projects outside the UK business hours, but it brings to me know that their projects do not get approved outside that time mostly.
That's lethal for this workplace. May be the only solution is to get your work done through offers or direct contact with a freelancer (although that misses the entire point of finding out the right freelancer through a posted job).
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It's a global website though. Whilst it may be outside of UK business hours, it isn't for the US and beyond. Years ago that was covered. Plus, freelancing isn't a 9 - 5 occupation anymore. They tell us that in their blogs!
Anyway, I don't know why I bothered. People without the necessary skillsets apply, and this is one such application received this morning - Nothing about their experience, skills, or proposed method of doing the job. Just this:
Hi, Great, the requirements are fine, also please tell me when can we start? -
@Nancy, guess what? There's a job for a typist for a small novella with a budget of 88.2K GBP. Hilariously, it's now been turned into a 'Talent Scout' project, and I received a PPH email to apply for it to secure a place as a Scouted freelancer. :-)
We can expect anything to happen now.
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You are right. My concern is whether the poster actually paid £250 as a Talent Scout fee, or if they possibly hacked their system to acquire Talent Scout status. If that fee was paid, it resembles a bribe for a scam. On another note, the person might have made a typo, intending to set a budget of £882 but mistakenly listing it as £88.2k. Even then, for a job budget of £882, allocating nearly a third for the Talent Scout fee seems disproportionate.
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A definite bribe for a scam, Shahbaz, or in their terms 'speculate to accumulate.'
You can't mistakenly enter that amount. £882 would be just that. You can't put in K without writing the 000s in, if that makes sense. So no, you can't make that mistake. And even if you did, you'd be correcting it - cancelling and starting again once the offers flood in.
It's a job from someone with no previous form on PPH - no reviews. Come out of the woodwork and this is their first job. No one commands that type of money for a small book to be typed and PPH should have queried it. They're also probably rubbing their hands together and thinking about the commission this job will land them!
£250 is an outlay. If you can scam ten people you've more than made that back. These are big time crooks.
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I don't mind that so much. Some of my private clients only pay every 30 days. As long as you have a good supply of work coming in, you can stagger these payments so 14 days doesn't really matter. BUT and it's a big BUT now - there is no longer a good supply of work here. We all need to be more proactive and source our own through other means, I think.
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