New system aimed primarily at matching newer sellers with buyers
So now it seems I have to wait two hours before I can bid for a job. This is extremely unfair. Not only do experienced creatives/designers have to compete with an unfair playing field, ie people offered to do a job for £10 when it is clearly worth £100, we are now not allowed to bid for jobs as soon as they appear on PPH. What kind of system is this?!
Awful. Unfair. Unprofessional. Discriminatory.
Regards
C. Howe
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@Paul
"I am so delighted as a seller to find job values being continually eroded with sellers being co-erced by PPH to drop hourlie values in return for publicity."
You mean, in return for the possibility of publicity.
If you read the email, they don't promise to promote you if you do agree to discount your hourlie. They just say that if you don't discount it you won't get promoted, and if you do discount it, you might.
Unless they've changed the email - I wouldn't know, all the familiar old round robbins that I get from PPH go straight into trash.
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You're missing the point Paul. PPH discount the hourlies, you sell 3 hourlies for the price of 2 or whatever, and everybody wins because you've earned more money overall. It makes doodle squat difference how much time and effort you put into earning that money. All that counts is the bottom line. You've got nothing better to do have you? Of course if the reduction means your hourlies end up so cheap that you pay PPH's minimum commission on each one, so it's like 30% instead of their standard very reasonable 18%, well that is a bit tough but never mind because as long as you stay up all night to get them delivered in time, you'll keep CERT rating.
And another thing, has anybody seen our new knight in shining armour today? Michael, Michael, wherefore art thou Michael?
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Be of good cheer everyone, because PPH have made a new innovation.
Good news! Our system now recommends buyers the proposals that are sent by sellers who were matched to the specific job. Plus they'll be prompted to send a proposal
So, if you are the lucky enough to have PPH match you with a job you can do, they'll recommend you! Woohoo!
Sounds great until you realise that it does absolutely nothing to help anyone who'se not identified as suitable for a job they can do. If those people can actually make a proposal but haven't been identified by PPH as most suitable, they'll be at a disadvantage since PPH will be recomending people in preference to them.
So PPH is distorting the market even more on the basis of their skill matching algorithm. It's not just 'first dibs' to make a proposal, it's going to be a full-blown recommendation.
Nice eh?
Great if the system gets it right. We can see here how good it isn't.
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I forgot to mention the third persona: 'Sophia Jones'. She joins 'Lucy Clarke' and 'Emma Brown' as a visitor to your inbox.
Should we run a sweepstake on the next surname to be used? Pick one from the top 50 surnames in Britain, that kind of thing.
These marketing emails are annoying in different ways. I particularly hate their poor grammar and punctuation (3 mistakes in this morning's example). And, for the record, I don't need or want a logo.
I've got 160+ proposal credits too, with 80-odd added to the 85 they gave me earlier. As others have pointed out, having proposal credits doesn't magic suitable work, does it?
@Paul, I looked for the spamming competitor on FB but their post had been removed.
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Hello PPHers,
We are working on adding an option in the member profile that will allow for the emails to be unchecked if you no longer wish to receive these. This feature will be available in the next few weeks as we understand there is a need to customize what our users receive and provide the option to select what you want coming into your inbox. The unsubscribe option within certain sent emails will also be improved.
I have brought up the issue of grammar and punctuation mistakes to be more careful when these are being drafted.
Additional proposal credits have actually shown to increase the amount of bids that are made on the site. We have monitored this ever since we began offering more proposal credits to our users and it has increased overall bids and sales on the site.
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For feedback of the forum community, we have created the following forum topic. Please feel free to leave your opinions and i will review all comments to start improving our community based forums. Thank you.
http://support.peopleperhour.com/entries/102028373-Forum-Improvement-Feedback
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Michael, as someone who has used PPH for a long time, I feel a chill.
Every time PPH has looked at building better forums, it has been a precursor to wiping out all existing forum discussions and thereby removing all critical comment in one fell swoop.
My cynical hat tells me this is about to happen again.
You don't need another thread Michael, PPH just needs to address in a timely manner, the posts made on the existing forums and not ignore the tougher questions or respond in vague, inconclusive, corporate-speak.
Your predessor Kelly used to cherry-pick the posts she would respond to and would often just avoid engaging in tough questions.
There has never been a community manager that has actually managed the role properly at PPH .
My favourite was Dea-Marie, but she's escaped PPH. Her successor, who seemed to have been responsible for the infamous PPH site revamp, escaped to American Express.
You have a tough gig, Michael.
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Kelly was sweet, bless her, but after her initial enthusisasm wore off she always used the same cut and paste answer, and it went something like 'I'm really sorry to hear that. Please contact customer support at xxx@xxxx and they will be able to assist you' - ANSWERED. What was so funny was that many of the posts that got this answer were users whose problem was that they'd been trying for weeks or months to get a sensible reply - or any reply at all - out of customer support.
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@PIe Thanks for bringing that up. Kelly was not a customer support member and therefore could not answer questions directly. Many issues that are brought up must be looked at with the users account details and payment transactions. This involved getting our support staff to look into these issues. Customer support may not always be on point with 24 hours, however i don't believe that it takes months to get a response as you claim. We work with a small team of staff who are trying to answer over 200+ tickets a day of customer queries and complaints. This is why we are looking to improve our support options by introducing live chat and the possibility of a crowd solution. From January until July, our SLA for response times had been improved to 24 hour response on over 90% of our incoming tickets. Starting in August, we have seen a spike of users on the site which has increased the average support ticket more than 25%. We are back to battling backlogs and we are trying to implement changes that will benefit our users so that response time and quality are improved.
@David I am sorry but i will not agree with your comment. I didn't ask for a new complaints forum to be made, I asked for feedback on improving the current structure of the forums and community. I am not 100% familiar with steps that have been made in the past, but i cannot take this for granted and not attempt to create a better system by using my own methods.
Regarding the answered tag, this can be applied to any comment that is posted in this forum. with over 14 pages of comments, it is quite likely that an answer has been provided to a specific question and therefore the entire thread appears as answered. I will go ahead and remove the answered option so that we are not giving the wrong impression that indeed there is a solution here for the main pain points.
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Getting rid of some of the numerous tech geeks who keep fiddling around with stuff that doesn't need fixing, but gets changed for the worse anyway, and employing more customer support staff makes more sense than trying to run something that is an essential element with a skeleton work force. We can all ask questions on here and give answers if we know them but the problem is that things change on such a regular basis it's ludicrous.
Over the past couple of weeks there have been numerous questions on here from new freelancers that we 'old hands' have been unable to answer. Their frustration has resulted in leaving again. This lack of ability in employing people in the areas they are needed most is not only infuriating but is also bad business sense.
If you know you are getting over 200 tickets a day then you have to have the people in place to deal with them and not expect us to do their work for them.
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"
For feedback of the forum community, we have created the following forum topic. Please feel free to leave your opinions and i will review all comments to start improving our community based forums. Thank you.http://support.peopleperhour.com/entries/102028373-Forum-Improvement-Feedback
"@Everyone
Yes, one can say "but Michael, we have already left our feedback, please read this thread and others like it". However, this thread, as with others, has become polluted with way too much noise - chatter, general complaints, and discussions about previous people's complaints about previous complaints, and so on.
Can I suggest to everyone that in the new forum thread Michael has linked to, keep your posts to a bare minimum of a post by you which contains your complaint/issue/request for improvement/etc, and not discuss each others posts between us, even if we strongly feel John was right about Sally being right about Bob having a good idea, etc.
No offence to anyone intended at all, but if PPH (in this case Michael) are genuinely trying to look at the issues we've reported, then shouldn't we try to help? We'd be helping ourselves too, of course.
I see a great deal of issues reported here, and mostly very genuine and legitimate issues, highlighting illogical features which are severely detrimental to us in many ways. One of my biggest annoyances in life is seeing businesses make silly mistakes and seemingly have no logic or common sense whatsoever.
So I understand fully the passion in everyone to try to report our thoughts and feelings on such strong matters, but our forming what is (arguably) becoming a lynch mob is not being constructive best we can be, and we're arguably becoming the same as what we're reporting to PPH as being - not being structured and offering simple clear cut services. We're just throwing around accusations, and sometimes slander.Especially basing Michael's potential efforts and abilities on past staff members - this is simply not fair.
Discussing the issues over and over between each other is not going to get them sorted, as the noise/clutter means too much time for PPH to read through all our chatter, Facebook this, and past PPH representatives which are not an issue any more.
It's what happens from now, with Michael, that counts. Let's give him the chance, and just post single post complaint/info/feedback and not discuss it all between each other.
If nothing happens, then we can at least say we did everything we could to assist PPH in resolving these issues, and fault, lack of care, or inability, lies with them.(And, Michael, firstly, for the love of God please make the comments box bigger, even a little bit!)
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Michael,
If you know you are getting over 200 tickets a day then you have to have the people in place to deal with them and not expect us to do their work for them.
I'd be interested to know out of the 200+ emails you get, what is the ratio of queries to complaints?
Also, out of curiosity, I'd be interested to know just how 'big' the 'IT dept' is???
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Michael, thanks for that reply. All we see is the orange PPH logo under somebody's name, and PPH not being the most transparent of companies we are never told what people's job function is or where in the hierarchy they are, so we naively assume that if they appear to be taking responsibility for something, then they have been given the powers to do that task.
With customer support, it's a problem of quality as well as timescale. I suspect that you simply log when tickets are raised and when they receive a response. So if as so often happens a cut and paste response that does not address the issue is logged as having been sent out within 24 hours, PPH probably considers that to be superb service. But for the user that is double frustrating because it hasn't answered the query, all it's done is sent them back to the back of the queue. Imagine going round that circle a couple of times, submit your ticket, get a rubbish reply, submit it again, get same rubbish reply from a different person - but hey PPH is doing great, tickets are being answered within 24 hrs. And let's be honest, there are queries that the support staff must not like the look of because they never get any response at all, presumably there is a way of diverting things into a black hole?
Of course if you stopped using customer support as an alternative to fixing the site, there wouldn't be as many tickets. If you had clear well written help guides to explain how the different functions work, and if you didn't keep changing things around, there wouldn't be as many lost souls trying to figure out how to perform basic operations. Then recurrent problems like PPH randomly closing accounts when people are in the middle of a job, or when they're about to pay for work they received, or when they have funds in their account that they want to withdraw. This is such a basic flaw, it should have been fixed as soon as it came to light. But no it still happens so you keep getting tickets about it.
Really, there should be very few situations where a query can be answered by a generic cut and paste response, because if it's a query that's been raised before, it's because it's something people need to know and haven't been told and it's going to be raised again and again, so you need to put the information out there where people can find it for themselves. Customer services should spend most of their time sorting out issues where problems have arisen because of an exceptional combination of circumstance.
There used to be a lot of talk about 'the user experience' but that seems to have been forgotten. about You have a disfunctional site, you bring in new rules that users don't understand and find it difficult to work with, your site is in English yet you employ customer service staff who have difficulty understanding and communicating in English, you don't employ enough of them, they work 9-5 on weekdays and take bank holidays off which is laughably ridiculous for an international freelancing platform, well this sentence could go on for ever really. The user experience is pants. You have a lot of intelligent freelancers on here and PPH treats everybody like retards.
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I'd like to add (before I forget), that it's always interesting when new website users have to resort to asking other users basic questions about the operation of a site, because either the help system is so bad, it's useless, or whenever you contact helpdesk staff, you feel like you might just as well be talking to a brick wall.
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An hour ago + I posted on this thread, but received a message at the top of the page stating my message is in moderation awaiting approval before posting it.
Why?
If this also goes into moderation queue to, please just reject it. I give up with the site's systems.
If not, can someone tell me why my previous comment is now in moderation, when previously it went straight through?
Adding, why not put in the message I received at the top why it's been put into a moderation queue, rather than (sigh as per most posts in the thread) leaving me hanging with poor service or knowing what is going on..
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