These days, feedback is a precious online commodity, and for Elance writers, there is nothing more valuable. With great feedback on your side, you’ll find it easier to bid more confidently, command higher fees, and receive preferential treatment from buyers.
In a perfect world, delivering top-notch writing would win you five-star feedback every time—but Elance is a far from perfect world. Let’s take a closer look at some of the tactics writers can use to ensure they get the feedback they deserve…
Screen your buyers carefully
If you have spent much time on the Elance Water Cooler, you’ve probably read a few posts in which a despondent contractor shares a tale of woe about unfair feedback from an unreasonable or downright nutty buyer. You may also have noticed a pattern in the responses to these posts: most of the time, forum participants will quickly point out that the contractor could have saved themselves some grief by checking the buyer’s project history before accepting the job. Often, that buyer history reveals a clear pattern of dissatisfaction and unrealistic expectations.
If the buyer has routinely left poor feedback for the contractors they’ve worked with in the past, chances are they’re not going to break the pattern when it comes time to evaluate your performance. Think very carefully before choosing to work with them.
Of course, sometimes a buyer is justified in leaving bad feedback—some contractors just don’t deliver on their promises. Ultimately, you’ll need to review the buyer’s history carefully and then make a decision based on your gut feeling. Screening your prospective clients won’t give you 100% protection against unfair feedback, but it will help you eliminate the vast majority of problematic situations.
Deliver a great work experience—not just great work
Sometimes writers get bad feedback for bad writing. But if you browse some of the comments that accompany poor ratings, you’ll see that bad feedback is often given for poor-quality service. Poor communication—or no communication—is just as likely to be at the root of a buyer’s dissatisfaction.
Even if you end up delivering a masterpiece, a buyer is unlikely to forgive a nerve-wracking experience in which their writer goes missing at any point during a project. So make sure you respond promptly to all communications from the buyer. If you’re too busy to respond fully, you can at least fire off a message acknowledging their email and letting them know that you’ll attend to the matter within a certain number of hours.
If your buyer tends to be slow in responding, be proactive in asking them whether they’re satisfied with the progress of the work, and whether there’s anything more you can do to make the experience better. Making the effort to check in regularly shows you’re committed to delivering excellent service, and that goes a long way towards encouraging good feedback.
Make sure your buyer understands the feedback system
I’m an accomplished writer and I strive to deliver quality work, but until fairly recently, I didn’t have a perfect feedback score on Elance. Why? Because I didn’t make the effort to educate my Elance clients about the feedback system. On Elance, anything less than a top score indicates a level of dissatisfaction with the contractor’s services. But how is the buyer supposed to know that?
They won’t. Unless you tell them.
Buyers who have used Elance regularly are more likely to be aware of the need for perfect scores, but newer buyers may believe that 4/5 is a perfectly acceptable feedback score. As an example, if you look at some of my early client feedback on my Elance profile page, you’ll see that some buyers have given me scores of anywhere from 4 to 4.7 alongside glowing comments thanking me for delivering stellar work.
You’ll find more tips in my ebook on getting the feedback you deserve from your Elance buyers, but the ultimate takeaway is this: earning consistently top-notch feedback on Elance requires more than just delivering consistently top-notch work. To ensure better feedback, screen your buyers carefully, practice proactive communication throughout the project, and make sure your buyer understands the feedback process.
Have you ever received unfair feedback? Looking back on the experience, what could you have done differently?
