As Upwork is continuing to focus on becoming more customer centric, all areas of the company are incorporating customer interactions and feedback into their roles. This ensures that critical decisions made with the product experience, policies, and customer engagement truly take into account the customer’s perspective.
While we are thrilled with this continued focus, we’ve recognized that in order to gain the most meaningful feedback, it’s necessary that we build a collective database of customers who can offer tangible insight. This database will be shared with various cross functional teams and will house details of customers who have contacted support, some with specific pain points that affect the customer journey and some that want to share general and positive feedback.
Once you determine that the customer fits the criteria for this program, then ask the customer if they are open to be contacted via email or phone call by an Upwork team member.
This process will guide you through how to determine if the customer should be added to the Customer Insights Pool and if so, then proceed with asking the customer for permission to be added.
Agents must set the expectation that users will be added to the pool and may or may not be contacted by our cross functional teams. Note that this process is designed to collect feedback and user insight only. This is not to be considered an escalation path to resolve a customer problem so all contacts must be handled as normal.
See process below.
First, does the customer fall into any of these categories:
Automatic Disqualifiers:
Active Dispute
Open Escalation
Active Suspension / Permanent Suspension
Warnings for offensive/hateful speech
Issues surrounding chargebacks
Issue is related to an open bug
If yes to any of the above, the customer should NOT be asked to join the Customer Insights Pool.
Scenario 1:
General and/or Positive Feedback:
We welcome any Client or Freelancer feedback as long as they do not fall into one of the automatic disqualifiers: (see above for list)
Scenario 2:
Customers with specific feedback.
We are also interested in talking to customers with specific feedback or who have encountered specific pain points in their Upwork journey. Again, we welcome any client or freelancer feedback as long as they do not fall into one of the automatic disqualifiers. (see above for list)
Suggested scenarios/topics to determine when to solicit from the customer:
If customer is both FL/HVFL and CL:
- If customers initiate feedback, collect their information so that they may be added to the pool.
- Users who have challenges navigating the platform.
- Poor contract outcome with no recourse (no longer qualified for mediation or mediation has been exhausted)
- If a customer has reached out to Customer Support more than five times in a month on the same issue.
Freelancer/High Value Freelancer
- Loss of Top-Rated badge
- Decrease in Job Success Score of more than 10 points from week to week
- Lack of Payment Methods available
- Scheduled disbursement of earnings
- Membership Plan charges and reversals
Client/High Value Client
- Account funding (issues funding escrow, requests to pre-fund, payment method flexibility)
- Membership Plan Charges and Reversals
- Posting Job Navigation: Selecting Weekly Salary vs Hourly
- A client that is unsure of how to scope their project, unsure of milestones, descriptions, etc.
Catalog users
- If confirmed Catalog user -
- Bad Project Outcome (Freelancer/Client)
- Users with platform navigation challenges (Catalog Dashboard)
- Questions on how to complete project requirements (Client)
Collecting permission from customers:
Should a customer meet the criteria above, the agent will solicit permission from the customer to be included in Customer Insights Pool.
Example:
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. You’ve shared some really valuable feedback that I’ll be sharing with our team. Would it be ok if I also passed along your contact details? In the future, the team may want to reach out to you in order to discuss your experiences in more detail to learn how we can continue to make Upwork better.
Documenting customer feedback:
Customers who agree to be contacted should be added to this form using pertinent information from the interaction as well as their account. This information includes:
- Summary of issue along with ZenDesk ticket link
- Indicate whether the issue was resolved
- How was it resolved? If not resolved, what are the pending steps?
- Did the customer proactively offer feedback or did you ask if they’d like to be contacted?
- Reason why you are recommending the customer
- Capture any verbatim comments that were offered by the customer
Additionally, it will be necessary to collect the following information for cross functional partners so that they are prepared to initiate contact:
- Preferred method of communication - email or phone call
- Email address
- Phone number (including country code)
- Best time to call