How To Deal With Negitive Review On Fiverr

I thought this would pair well with the upcoming Advice post this month, and so, this will be the story of my first unhappy customer (and how they caused me to stop voice acting for a while). While I regret the situation, I think there was a lot to learn from it. With that said, let’s get into the story.

This happened way back, right when I had started voice acting. I still had terrible equipment and didn’t use recording or even editing software. I recorded online and used the recorder to re record over the top of mistakes. This made for some very bad quality products, but for $5 on fiverr I suppose people were getting what they paid for. This order in particular was a children's book, nothing too unordinary. Until the website I recorded on started to distort my voice. The client asked for a child sounding voice, and I could barely pass for a child as it was (I hadn’t tried a new voice before this), but now the recordings came out slow and low pitched. I re recorded and re recorded, and then re recorded again, but for some reason the website I used distorted my voice beyond recognition.

This was super frustrating, I was beginning to run out of time and I didn’t see and other website that looked ‘safe’ enough to trust downloading my recordings from. Instead, I tried to change the pitch and tempo of the audio file, but now the voice sounded even stranger. I was listening to a robots voice at this point, and it wasn’t a quality product in the slightest. I played around with the files for hours before giving up with what I thought was the only file that was remotely listenable. I shamelessly delivered the file, and told the client of the technical troubles I was having on my end. I admit I didn’t offer to redo the project, but at this point I was ready to wash my hands of this experience. It was at this point I had decided I had worked too much on it already. After which, I went to bed and tried to forget about the frustration of the file.

Until the next morning, when I received a notification my client wanted to cancel the order. I was angry at first, I had spent about ten hours on this project just trying to get a measly $4 from this person. But I also just wanted this ordeal to be over, so I accessed the page and looked over what the whole thing was about. I wasn’t surprised to see that it was from the quality of the recording, I completely understood this. It wasn’t what they wanted, it certainly wasn’t what I wanted.

So I swallowed my pride for a bit when the client started to sternly lecture me about how technical issues happen all the time and I should have been better prepared. After all, this was true. I didn’t have any control over the technology, but I could have tried harder somewhere I was sure. I was however, upset about them claiming I was a scam artist and they were going to leave a horrible review telling everyone never to buy from me. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach then. Despite this, I still let them cancel on me. And lo and behold the next day I got the worst comment of my career. It basically said all the things I mentioned above and much, much more. To the point it was borderline hate, and this time I wouldn’t let myself be tarnished. I contacted Fiverr and explained the situation, showed them lots of photos of the experience and they rightfully took down the comment. The user got blocked for harassment, but I’m sure they just made another account. They were too cheap to give up that easily.

There was a lot I learned from all this. First, always ask for an extension instead of turning in bad work. Second, explain what the problem is and explain what you are doing about it. Third, if they still don’t like the project ask if they’d consider a revision. Fourth, don’t be bullied. Fifth, there are just going to be some jobs that end up not being wroth it. At all. Apart from that, I learn Fiverr is a pretty nice site for beginning freelancers like I was at the time.

The only thing I can say now, is that everyone reading this learns to give great customer service, but also know when it’s time to do something about it. I know it was an eye opening lesson for me!

For and curious readers, here is my Fiverr page:

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