Text Message vs. Phone Call: What Canadian Customers Prefer (Research)

"Customers just want to text now" is a common assumption among small business owners, and it's partly true — but the research on channel preference is more nuanced than a simple text-versus-call ranking. Twilio, which processes a large share of business text messages and calls globally, along with Salesforce's customer engagement research and CFIB's small business member surveys, have each looked at how channel preference actually breaks down. The honest answer is: it depends heavily on the customer's age, the urgency of the issue, and the type of business involved.

A note on sources: communications platform research (like Twilio's) is produced by a company with a commercial interest in messaging adoption, which is worth keeping in mind when reading their statistics. Preference surveys are also inherently self-reported — what people say they prefer in a survey doesn't always match what they actually do when they need something urgently. With that caveat, the consistency of certain patterns (age-based preference, urgency-based preference) across multiple independent research sources makes the directional findings useful.

Texting Preference Skews Heavily by Age

Research aggregated by Twilio in its consumer messaging preference studies has consistently found that younger consumers (broadly, under 40) report a strong preference for text-based communication with businesses for non-urgent matters like appointment reminders, order updates, and simple questions, while preference for phone calls rises steadily with age. This pattern is one of the more consistent findings across multiple survey years and multiple research organizations — it is not a fringe or contested result.

For a small business, this means a single default channel serves some of your customer base poorly no matter which one you pick. A business serving a broad age range likely needs to support both channels rather than assuming one has "won."

Urgency Flips the Preference, Regardless of Age

Salesforce's customer engagement research has found that even consumers who report a general preference for texting shift toward calling when the matter is urgent or complex — a same-day appointment change, an emergency repair need, or a billing dispute, for example. Texting is generally the preferred channel for low-stakes, asynchronous communication; calling remains preferred when the customer needs an answer immediately or the topic requires back-and-forth clarification that's slower over text.

Appointment Reminders Are the Clearest Texting Win

Across nearly every research source reviewed, appointment reminders are the use case where texting shows the clearest, most consistent preference and effectiveness advantage over calling. Text reminder studies commonly cited in the customer communications literature report meaningfully reduced no-show rates for businesses that switched from calling to texting appointment reminders, largely because a text can be read and acted on (or ignored, prompting a follow-up) more conveniently than a phone call that may go unanswered.

Certain Industries Still Skew Heavily Toward Calls

Research on channel preference by industry — including studies referenced in Twilio's business messaging reports — has found that higher-trust, higher-stakes categories like health services, legal services, financial services, and emergency home repair retain a stronger customer preference for phone calls even among younger demographics, compared to categories like retail and hospitality where texting preference is more uniform across age groups. The working explanation in this research is that trust and the need for a real-time, adaptive conversation both favour a live call when the stakes are higher, regardless of a customer's general channel habits.

Businesses That Offer Both Channels Perform Best

CFIB's small business member surveys, alongside broader customer experience research from Salesforce, point to the same practical conclusion: businesses that can meet a customer on whichever channel they reach out through — rather than forcing all inquiries into a single channel — see better satisfaction and conversion outcomes than businesses that only support one. This is intuitive but frequently ignored in practice, since supporting both text and phone well has historically required more staffing than a small business can justify.

What This Means for Canadian Small Businesses

The research doesn't support a simple "customers prefer texting now, stop answering the phone" conclusion, nor does it support ignoring text in favour of calls only. It supports a channel-matched approach: use text for reminders, confirmations, and simple low-urgency updates, and make sure a real, responsive phone channel remains available for the higher-stakes, higher-urgency conversations where customers — across every age group — still consistently prefer to talk to someone. For many Canadian small businesses, particularly in trades and health services, the phone call is not becoming obsolete; it's becoming the channel reserved for the moments that matter most.