Clients don't message during your office hours. They message when the thought occurs — 9pm after their board meeting, Sunday while reviewing the site, 6am before their flight. The channel moved into their pocket; their pocket doesn't keep business hours.
The four options, honestly
Ignore until morning. Defensible — and quietly expensive. The client's question sat visibly "delivered" for twelve hours, and every competitor pitching them promises to be "more responsive". Fine for true one-offs; corrosive as the default.
The PM answers from bed. The common reality. It works until your best PM burns out or unionizes their evenings, and it trains clients that 10pm answers are the service level. The agency is paying overtime in attrition instead of money.
An autoresponder. "We'll reply during business hours" is honest and useless — it answers nothing and adds a message the client must now ignore.
An agent answers what it can prove. Most after-hours messages are status questions — answerable instantly from the board, no human required. The rest get captured: turned into tickets, checked against scope, queued with a draft reply for a human to approve in the morning. The client gets an immediate, truthful response either way; nobody's evening is sacrificed.
The line that keeps it healthy
The agent answers questions; humans make commitments — at 9pm exactly as at 9am. What kills agencies isn't answering at night; it's deciding at night, tired, casually, in a chat thread. Take the routine traffic off the humans and the late-night decision pressure mostly disappears with it.
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