If we could not get an urgent job onto your phone, that job is not counted against you. It is removed from your response rate entirely, and recorded as our failure rather than your silence.
Why this needs saying out loud
Responsiveness is one of the things we rank on. That is only fair if the thing being measured is actually your behaviour. A notification that never arrives looks identical, from the outside, to a tradie who saw the job and ignored it — and scoring the two the same way punishes people for our plumbing.
Phones are genuinely unreliable in this respect. Notification permissions get denied, tokens go stale, a handset changes, a network drops the message. None of that is something you did.
How it works in practice
Every urgent offer we send is checked against whether a notification for it actually reached a device. Only offers that did are included in your response rate. The number of offers left out is recorded separately and visibly, because a large one is a problem on our side that we should be fixing, not a detail to bury.
The response time is a median, not an average
We take the middle of your response times, not the mean. One job where you were up a ladder and took a minute should not drag your typical figure up for months — an average is moved a long way by a single outlier, and a median barely notices it.
The same principle, in the app
If your phone cannot receive notifications, the app tells you which of the two problems it is. If it is a permission you need to change, it says so and takes you to the setting. If the failure is ours, it says that plainly, offers to try again, and tells you that you are not being marked down for it.
Sending someone to fix a setting that is already correct wastes their time and teaches them the warning means nothing.