Playbook, marketing agency
What our hours mean when something is running all night
An office has hours. A live campaign does not, and neither does the dashboard a client opens at half past eleven on a Sunday because a number looked wrong. The thing worth publishing is not when the door is locked but what cover exists over an account that is spending money while nobody is at a desk, and what genuinely waits until Monday.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for opening hours holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- Money keeps leaving a client's budget outside office hours, which turns the hours question into a question about supervision rather than about availability.
- The reporting cycle sets a clock of its own: clients look at a dashboard between reports, form a view at an odd hour, and want to talk about it before the scheduled call, and publishing the reporting day heads off half of that.
- Launch dates land against the client's calendar rather than the agency's, so a campaign starting on a public holiday needs a cover arrangement written down before the holiday rather than during it.
- The account team, the studio and anybody freelance in the delivery chain keep different hours, and a client given one set of hours will apply them to everybody.
How it arrives
- is anyone watching the campaign at the weekend
- what day do the monthly reports come out
- who covers the account over the bank holiday
- can we get something changed on a saturday
- what time do you stop replying to emails
- we are launching on a monday morning is anyone in early
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Office hours and account cover, listed as two different things | When the team is at desks, and separately what happens to a live account outside those hours. A client given only the first assumes the second matches, and finds out otherwise on a Saturday. |
|---|---|
| The reporting calendar | Which day reports land, what period they cover, and when the review call sits. Most contact outside hours is a client filling the gap between a number they saw and a conversation they have not had. |
| The urgent route, and what qualifies for it | The address or number for something that cannot wait, with examples of what does and does not qualify. Without the examples the route is either never used or used for everything. |
| Holiday and shutdown dates, with the cover for each | Dated entries rather than a general note about bank holidays, and who is covering live accounts on each. A general note ages quietly into a wrong answer with nobody editing it. |
The reply
The team is at desks during the hours on our contact page, and that page separately sets out what cover exists on live accounts outside them, which is not the same thing [1]. Reports land on the day listed there, so if a number looks wrong between reports that is the conversation to have with your account lead [2]. If something on a live account cannot wait, use the urgent route on that page rather than this chat, because I cannot see any account and nobody is reading this box overnight.
It separates desk hours from account cover in the first sentence, because that is the misunderstanding behind the angry Sunday message. Pointing at the reporting day gives a client something concrete to wait for. And it says plainly that the chat is not monitored, which is the sentence that pushes somebody towards the route that works.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor needs something changed, checked or paused on a live account, or says something cannot wait.
That needs somebody with the account open and I am not that, and I cannot judge how urgent it is. Use the urgent route on our contact page now, and leave me your name and an email if you want it in writing as well.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never say whether the office is open at this moment, since there is no reliable sense of the time where the visitor is.
- Never say anybody is monitoring a campaign right now, because cover is a rota fact that changes.
- Never promise a reply outside the hours the agency actually publishes.
- Never say a change can wait until Monday, because that is a judgement about an account nothing here can see.
Questions
- Should we publish out of hours cover at all?
- Publish what genuinely exists, including nothing. Clients accept that an agency is not staffed at three in the morning. What they do not accept is discovering it during an incident, and a written arrangement also stops an account lead's mobile becoming the policy.
- Can it tell a client whether their campaign is running?
- No. It has no access to any advertising account, reporting tool or project system, so anything about a live account is a handover. What it absorbs is the hours question underneath, which is most of the traffic.
- How do we keep holiday cover accurate?
- Point it at the page you maintain rather than uploading a copy, and put the dated entries on that page. It quotes what is published, so keeping it right is an edit rather than a re-upload.
Keep reading
- Everything for a marketing agencyService definitions and engagement terms convert. A price quoted for work nobody has scoped is the trap on an agency site.
- Handling opening hours in generalHolidays, seasonal variation, last orders and multiple sites. Keeping one source of truth so the assistant and your map listing agree.
- Which payment failed, and how fast does it matterA retainer invoice that bounces is a finance matter. A card declining on an advertising account stops live delivery within hours.
- Who has access to what, when the accounts belong to the clientThe seats in question are on the client's own advertising and analytics accounts. Withdrawing them is the client's right, and often an accident.
- Something is broken and spend is still going outThis is a handover rather than an answer. A broken site or a missing tag during a live campaign costs money by the minute.
Try it on your own material
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