Account manager kept saying 'next week' for 2 months, escalated once and got an answer in 3 hours
We hired a content agency back in March for a full site rewrite. The account manager gave us the same update every Friday for eight straight weeks: client review is almost done, we'll have those edits to you next week. I kept pushing back gently but didn't want to burn the relationship. Finally I copied their VP on a simple email asking for a status and a delivery date. That same afternoon I got a call with the full draft attached and a note that they'd been sitting on it for 40 days while waiting on an internal sign-off from a freelancer who'd gone quiet. My mistake was assuming the weekly update meant work was happening. Has anyone else had to escalate mid-project to actually get moving, or is this pretty standard for bigger shops?
Been through almost the exact same thing with a design shop two years back. Every Thursday they'd send this cheerful little recap saying things were "in final review" and we'd get files "early next week." Six weeks of that, and when I finally called the owner directly, turns out our project was basically abandoned in a shared drive because the guy who was supposed to do the mockups quit and nobody reassigned it. The weekly emails were just some template the junior account person was filling in without actually checking anything. Now I ask for a specific deliverable date and a sample of work in progress at every check-in, because a status update without proof is just words.