Working hours
I see that others have mentioned this, and I'd like to add this to my wish list as well. Being able to set, for example, 9-6pm availability on my end would really help -- particularly as it can affect stats, and (as others have mentioned) our primary source of income on VB hinges upon our stats.
Thanks for your consideration and hard work.
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Hi Peter!
Thanks! This is a great idea. We have been reviewing this idea for a while now and we are brainstorming ways in which we can implement this feature. If you have any ideas in which we can do it, it would be super appreciated so I can bring it to the table. The more ideas, the better!
Thank you Peter!
A timely discussion - I actually had a job come in last night at 12:16 a.m. while I was asleep (client was in a different time zone). So I wasn't able to accept the job for about 6 hours, which negatively affected my stats.
For a specific action plan, I think it's more important to take a good first step than necessarily finding the perfect step.
So perhaps a good first step would be to have a setting in Bunny Pro profiles that allows us to set our hours of availability.
This would be tied only to our stats.
In other words, nothing would have to change from the client's perspective. Bunny Pros/samples could still be visible to clients. Meaning, a client could still hire us during off hours.
BUT -- our stats would only be affected during our availability hours.
So for example...
Let's say I set my hours from 9-6p.m. (my time).
A client in another time zone hires me at 1 a.m. (my time).
Let's say I accept the job at 9:15 a.m. (my time).
This would mean it took me 15 minutes to accept the job.
This way the clients would still have the full selection of Bunny Pros and samples to choose from, can hire us whenever they want, and our stats aren't negatively affected.
I agree with you on this. I'm the opposite---I can only record at night, except on rare off-days. If a booking or revision comes in at 5:30 am my time...sorry, but I am NOT going to be able to get to that until later, and then I get those annoying reminder emails about how "time is money!" ...well, so are the other things we need to do to make a living, and most of us do have other work and priorities! Unless it is a "speedy" (which I don't accept) I think it is entirely reasonable to have a standard of delivering finished audio within 24 hours, which allows people of all different life/work schedules to have their work considered as being submitted on time.
This is my suggestion---which, although it wouldn't affect the stats issue (which kind of evens out anyway because bookings and revisions come at all times of the day and night; I get GREAT response time on those 1 am bookings haha): Allow us, whether manual or automated, to have a "most active between the hours of _____" in our profiles. This maybe wouldn't help stats, but would help:
1. Clients. If you set your hours between 9-6 your time as mentioned, and you have an international client who hires you at 2:30 am your time, that client will know during what time frame they can reasonably expect to get a response. It may also save money on that whole "backup contest" deal because they can realize that your working hours simply haven't started at the time they sent it.
2. Managers/support team. It's very irritating to get the emails, whether form mails or personalized, with the slightly patronizing tone chiding you for not having accepted the job yet when *it is not during the hours you are available to be at home/at your computer/recording.* If, say, on the flip side from you I were to set my "most active hours" as between 6 pm-2 am, I can avoid getting e-mails at 7-8 am asking if I've seen the job yet because they will realize "oh hey, this person DOES always deliver within 24 hours but is probably not able to record yet at the time we are sending this email."
Thanks for weighing in, Kira. For me personally, stats are the crucial point. In my ideal world I want my stats to be 100% influenced by things I control, and that way they accurately reflect my capabilities. I'm actually a full time voice over talent, so VO is how I make a living... stats are how I remain competitive on VB.
Gotcha. I make my living largely off VO too, but it's a ton of in-studio stuff here in LA and I'm connected with a lot of other sites/rosters as well. VB is just one particular avenue of income for me so I tend not to be terribly concerned about stats---as in, if someone doesn't want to hire me because I can't turn around a job in only two hours, it's probably less stress off my back anyway in that case ;) But in the case of people who make a large source of their income working from home or off this particular site, I can certainly understand the concern in that regard. It sounds like people have been asking for this for years, so I hope they will finally implement a solution, even if it's not perfect at first.
Great idea and discussion.
I'd like to suggest and addition to this. It would be nice to 'freeze the clock' when a project is flagged.
I've had some instances where the client and I are working opposite ends of the clock because of time zones, and I have flagged a project because something is unclear. Depending on where the client is located, it can take the better part of a day for them to respond. In the meantime, the clock is ticking and my stats are being negatively impacted.
The client is now influencing stats and there's nothing you can do but decide whether or not I want to submit the work sans clarification and risk a revision request... Which may also have a negative impact on stats.
Hi all!
These ideas are all super interesting. The clock freeze is particularly interesting for me as I believe it would be a good solution for projects where you and the client are in different time zones. I'm definitely passing this over to our product team!
Thank you for your feedback! You guys are awesome :)
Hi there!
Can I also put my 2cents in the discussion? I was literally just starting with you guys in the middle of my aplicación process when the actual test came in at 2am I was sleeping and had a bunch of work the following morning that it took me 16 hours to get back to it.. the result was not having not even 1 job appear of my project tab. The solution to all our troubles (in my idea) is to add to the vacation option the feature to specify the date "and time" we will not going to be available. This way we can control the issues when it's night time in our end. I am believing you guys can know because of our IP address the location correct? I hope this would be so becuse this implementation "hopefully" would not have to be a gigantic update on your end. This way we have a little of control of the outside circumstances that are affecting our stats and our capability to get work. I was stuck with this issue since day 1 and there was no way to fix this. I am requesting to cancel my account and start over again.
So far all of the contests that I have been invited to have shown up over night. All of them. I have gotten none during the day at all. I'm not sure what to do about that. I'm not going to stay up all night just to look and see if I have been invited to a contest.
So, I've got a response speed ranking of 0%. What do I do about that?
I would really love this. I often stay up until 3 am with VB open, eager to work. When I wake up in the am, I often see 3-4 jobs I would have loved to do, all between 4-7 am.
I definitely agree. 95% of the contests I've been offered come through overnight, btwn 1-4am, so it's unrealistic for me to "throw my hat in the ring" --- setting our work hours would be wonderful. Being in the PST time zone, too, has been tricky, as I am usually in the studio from 10am to 6pm PST.
My comment might belong on a separate thread but I feel it's related. I have concerns about stats. What happens when a talent legitimately flags a project because he needs additional direction before accepting a project?
While the talent waits for a response from support (or the client) the clock is ticking and stats potentially plummet.
I suppose there is risk that some might try to exploit the system by needlessly flagging projects to stop the clock. But I would think that VB could spot those and issue a warning.
Dunno. I just know that I have a flagged project sitting there... tick-tock. Do I wait (it can be a full 24 hours) for a response, or record and hope I understand what the client wants? When I see I'm the second booking on a project where they rejected the previous actor, I want to be sure I know exactly what they want... or I'll wind up being the next rejection.
It feels too much like gambling, instead of smart business practice. And my stats are being influenced by things that are out of my control. I would hope that talent would not be penalized for flagging a project with a question that potentially saves time and money.
Thanks for your consideration.
It's been almost a year since Peter's OP (hey Peter) and this seems to be an ongoing issue on VB's platform. I wrote a post in 'Advice And Tips' before I stumbled on this thread via another user's post. I'm in the Eastern Time Zone or UTC -5 and this week alone I've received 15-18 invitations to Speedy's and Contest between the hours of 11:30pm and 6:00am and next to nothing between 8am-6pm.
I have friends who are coders and implementing even the smallest feature/improvement can be labor intensive, however, this seems to be a consistent suggestion/complaint among users of all levels of experience on the VB platform.
I think Peter's suggestion of hours of availability is a great feature because we all operate differently. Some people prefer working overnight, or afternoons, or may need to stagger hours based on other factors like school, familial obligations, or children (we all have lives). Having the ability to select when a talent is open for business seems like it would benefit the client and talent. Otherwise, you have what you have now where a client picks a talent whom might live in California and the client is in the UK (is it still PC to say the UK?) and has to wait an entire day to hear back from the selected talent.
Hi everyone! This is Santiago Jaramillo. I am part of the Bunny Inc. team.
Allow me to share with you our current roadmap and what you can expect from this and other features. The product and engineering team is currently working on stabilizing the system. What does it mean? That whenever anyone uses the system, it works as expected. While it might sound simple, this is a project that we started five months ago and will be the principal investment for most of 2018. Why so long? Because it requires re-writing up to 60% of the code to make it faster and more reliable. The majority of the users won't notice the difference, but it allows and prepares the system for growth. After the team completes this project, we'll re-open the conversation on new features and define their priorities. This request is visible for the team, and they are aware of the importance that the community is giving to it.
While I'd love to give you a different answer, I think it is the best for all of you to be aware of the situation and roadmap.
Thank you all for your patience, and we look forward to continuing serving all of you.
Regards
Thanks for the update, Santiago. While I’m sad to hear that improvements based on feedback from voice talents isn’t a priority for 2018, I can certainly appreciate the size and scope of a massive rewrite. I was looking through some old emails and realized my first job with Voicebunny was back in 2013! Nearly 600 Voicebunny jobs later, I felt sad to leave VB in ’17. I made somewhere in the $30,000-40,000 range during my time with Voicebunny, which means that VB made an estimated $55,000-75,000 (approx. 200% markup, minus the costs for revisions, etc.). How time flies! I know how hard you, Angela, and the team work, and as I mentioned to Angela, I’d love to come back some day if some improvements were put in place, such as:
I noticed that two of these features I recommended are the top-voted requests in the forums. I do wish VB the best, and I hope to cross paths again some day! Thanks for all your hard work, Santiago.
Warmly,
Peter
When a booking notification comes in, can the VoiceBunny team simply add the amount of time the VO has to respond to that notification?
Hi everyone, please Voice Bunny managers fix this. I don't get any contests at day but I get a lot while I'm sleeping at night. I'm worried this is affecting my stats.
It would be great that everyone of us can get the contests auditions in our working time zone.
Please, please, please fix this, thank you so much!
Hi,
I wonder if there is an update on this at all? I received a Revision request last night at 21:00, due to needing an authorisation on a Payment request, the Review wasn't able to be actioned until midnight (when I was already asleep and cannot record). I then received a few messages to say that the revision was waiting to be received. If I could set my working hours in my Time Zone, it wouldn't be the case that it took me 10/12 hours to do it, it would be more like 45 minutes!
Best wishes
Fiona
Hi Fiona,
Thank you for reaching out and letting us know about your case.
Our team is fully aware of the situation, however, we do not have further information as to when could it be available for us.
We'll bring it up again to the team, however, we know they already have it on their mind for future releases.
I am so glad you're bringing this up, and wondering what progress has happened since this discussion started in 2017! I am Arab living in North America (worse, West Coast/Pacific Time), which means most of my clients would be from the middle east. On average, I would receive projects at 3 a.m. my time. My workday starts at 9 a.m. Automatically, I am 6 hours late to accept the job. That hurts my stats.
Hi Aixa,
Thank you for reaching out. Our team is still figuring out the best way to implement something like working hours for our Pros.
In the meantime, one of the solutions we have is evaluating projects case by case to remove some of the delays, which might end up helping Pros' stats.
Let me invite you to write to us whenever you think this might be your case. We're here to help you!
Same, I work from 12-6 PM Mountain time. Would love a feature to implement working hours.
Being able to set your working hours would be a BIG help (and from reading through the thread, it's been a concern for a LONG time.) I would think that since the VB team can track holiday time, they could adapt that feature to track time off for each day.
There's absolitely no reason why this feature couldn't have been added by now. This thread is over 5 years old and growing older by the day shows VB isn't listening. A new site could have been developed and launched (a few times over) since 2017.
This "Working Hour" thing still not working in 2023. Just saw a 6:00 a.m email, 8:00 a.m email and 10:26 a.m email in my time zone. Even though the "time zone" option is selected, contest, speedy and booking request emails still mostly received between 11:30 p.m to 9 a.m. I am not going to wake up and record in the middle of the night.