Perhaps I missed the brief on the briefs. My experience with these has been a notch better than buyer requests, but they still lack the seriousness of most direct messages. Of course, now I understand that these are meant to replace the inbox altogether. The only messages I get in my inbox are from old clients, nothing new in about a month. So it was a great surprise when I noticed my response rate had plummeted to 80% & my response time hovered at 8 hours. As I said, I must have missed the major announcement that let us know that briefs count towards these metrics.
Now that I understand this, I'm presented with a dilemma. Should I click Not Interested on the $5 (flexible) briefs that ask for me to single-handedly create the successor technology to ChatGPT for their women's hats store? That would seem like the way to go, but I don't trust the algorithm to understand the nuances of my reasoning. It's more likely to look at the keywords in the actual brief: Excel, VBA, spreadsheet, and then cross those off the list for sending briefs to me, leaving me with even worse results in the future. My next option is to send a message to the buyer stating, "sorry too busy", which is something reasonable had they actually contacted me in the first place, but these briefs are supposedly spread out to multiple sellers.
Basically, we now have a barely better buyer requests that we are forced to respond to. Not good. These should NOT affect our response rate.
