How long will it take?
What agencies and studios need to publish
They usually have a fixed external date. If you cannot meet it, both sides want to know now.
How customers actually ask it
The same intent arrives in wording your page probably does not use. All of these mean the same thing:
- “How long will it take?”
- “typical timeline”
- “when can you start”
- “turnaround”
- “how soon can we launch”
What a complete answer contains
For agencies and studios specifically, an answer is only complete when it covers all 5:
- 1
Typical duration for your common project types
- 2
Current lead time before you could start, updated honestly
- 3
What you need from the client, and how client delay affects the date
- 4
Whether expedited delivery is possible and what it costs
- 5
The phases, so a long timeline is legible rather than opaque
A worked example
Illustrative — not a real business
A brand identity runs six to eight weeks; a website twelve to sixteen. We are currently booking four weeks out. Timelines assume feedback within three working days at each review — the most common cause of overrun is a review cycle sitting with the client.
Which page should own it
Process page
What silence costs
Timeline surprises after a contract is signed damage the relationship at exactly the point you need goodwill.
More questions agencies and studios get
Related
industry
AI customer support for agencies
Agencies field two kinds of question: what do you do, and what does it cost. Both are answerable from the site, and both currently interrupt someone senior. RubyRep answers them from your services and case study pages, and doubles as something you can deploy on client sites.
term
What is AI customer service?
AI customer service means answering customer questions with a language model rather than a person. The useful implementations are grounded in a specific business's own content; the poor ones let a general model improvise, which produces confident answers that are wrong.
term
What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
Does your site answer this already?
Point RubyRep at your website and ask it this exact question. If it cannot answer, neither can your customers.