Playbook, marketing agency
Two pots of money, and the client wants one of them back
A refund request at an agency almost never concerns a single sum. The fee paid for time that has been recorded and cannot be handed back to anybody. The media budget is the client's own money, most of it already delivered against, some of it perhaps sitting unspent in an account the agency happens to hold the login for. Those positions are different and the assistant has to keep them apart.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for refund requests holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- Part of what the client paid was never the agency's income, so a refund conversation splits at once into fees, earned against recorded time, and budget, which is theirs and may or may not still exist.
- Unspent budget usually sits inside an advertising account rather than in a bank, which makes returning it an access and account question rather than a payment one.
- A retainer paid monthly is an allowance consumed at whatever rate the month ran at, so stopping in week three does not leave three quarters of a fee sitting untouched.
- The request very often follows a campaign that did not work, which makes it a disagreement about results rather than about money, and conceding a refund there concedes a performance promise the agency never made.
How it arrives
- we want the unspent budget back
- can we have this months fee refunded the campaign never launched
- you still have our money in the ad account
- we are stopping halfway through the month what do we get back
- the work was not what we approved can we have a credit
- who do we ask about money we have already paid you
What has to be indexed for this to work
| What the fee pays for, and when it is earned | Whether a retainer is earned monthly, on delivery, or against recorded time, and what happens to a month stopped part way. Every refund conversation turns on this sentence and most agreements bury it. |
|---|---|
| How unspent media budget is handled | Whether it stays in the account, comes back, or carries to the next period, and how long that takes. It is the client's money and the answer should read as though everybody agrees on that. |
| The position on work that was rejected or redone | How many rounds of amends the scope includes, what happens when work is refused outright, and whether anything is credited. The dispute is about approval rather than about money, and this is the document that settles it. |
| Who decides a refund, and how long they take | A named route with a timescale. These escalate when they bounce between an account lead and finance, and publishing one destination stops that entirely. |
The reply
Those are two separate things. Our fee covers work carried out in the period, and how that is treated when an engagement stops part way is set out in the engagement terms [1]. Any media budget you funded that has not been spent is yours, and the same terms describe how it comes back or carries forward [2]. I cannot see any account, any balance or any invoice, so the amounts have to come from the account team. Leave your name, an email and the period you mean and someone will go through it.
It refuses to treat fee and budget as one number, because that conflation is what makes these conversations bad tempered. Calling the unspent budget the client's money in plain terms concedes nothing and takes most of the heat out. The refusal is about visibility rather than about policy, which is both true and much easier to accept.
Where it stops
The trigger. The client asks for a specific amount back, says a campaign never ran, or ties the request to the results they saw.
I cannot look at a balance or agree anything about money, and where a campaign did not run as expected somebody has to open the account. Leave your name, an email and the period you mean and the account team will call you.
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 agree that a refund, a credit or a partial fee is due.
- Never state how much unspent budget is sitting in any account.
- Never accept that a campaign underperformed, since that framing turns a money question into an admission.
- Never suggest a refund is normal where a client is unhappy, because it invites the request in every conversation after this one.
Questions
- Do we have to publish the position on unspent budget?
- It costs nothing and it prevents the worst version of this conversation, where a client believes the agency is sitting on their money. A paragraph saying it is theirs, where it sits and how it comes back is enough.
- Can it start a refund?
- No. It cannot take a payment, issue one, or see that one was ever made. Everything about an amount ends with a person, and the reply should say so before it offers to take details rather than after.
- Clients ask for money back because results were poor. What then?
- Hand it over without engaging with the performance point at all. Anything the assistant says about why a campaign did what it did will be treated as the agency's account of it, and it is working from published pages rather than from the campaign.
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 refund requests in generalA refund question is really about eligibility and timing. What to index, what the reply may promise, and where it has to reach a person.
- Can we get a call booked, typed by four different peopleA prospect, a client chasing an account lead, a supplier and a student all type the same request. Only one of them is a discovery call.
- Our own site, and the sites we build for other peopleOne visitor cannot use the agency's own site. Another is buying accessible work. The honest page answers them in different paragraphs.
- What our hours mean when something is running all nightThe office closes at six. The spend does not. What to publish about cover, reporting days, and who is watching a live account overnight.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.