Text, Message, and Phone

Imagine a tutor named Elin Marsh who teaches chemistry to Theo Castellanos, who is 15. On a Sunday at twenty to seven, his mother texts her. “Hi Elin, Theo has a chemistry test on Thursday and is in a bit of a state about it. Any chance of an extra hour on Tuesday? Thanks, Ana.” Elin sees the text at dinner. She decides it deserves a proper answer, and she will write one in the morning.

On Monday at 11, between two sessions, she writes an email. “Dear Mrs. Castellanos, thank you for your message yesterday evening. I would be glad to add a session for Theo this week. On Tuesday I could offer 4:00, 5:15, or 6:30. An additional session is charged at my usual rate of $120, and my 24-hour cancellation terms apply as usual. I look forward to hearing which time suits. Kind regards, Elin Marsh.” Every sentence in it is correct.

Ana was on the sofa on Sunday night with Theo’s week open in front of her. She looked at her phone twice before bed. On Monday she looked again on the way to work. By lunch she had asked Theo’s cousin, who is at university, to go through the test with him on Tuesday. She finds Elin’s email that evening, under 40 others, and writes back that they are sorted this week. She does not ask for an extra hour again that term. At the school gate, when another mother asks about Elin, Ana says, “She’s good, but you have to email her.”

Suppose instead that Elin answers from the table. “Hi Ana, yes. Tuesday at 5 works. Tell Theo to bring his last two tests and we’ll go through where the marks went. Elin.” It takes her 20 seconds. Ana writes back, “Perfect, thank you!” Theo’s week is set before the plates are cleared.

Elin had the same hour free both times, and she charges the same for it. What changed was where she answered, how much she wrote, and how long she took. Ana had shown her all three in the text, and the email ignored all three. Here is why a client notices the channel, the length, and the gap before the words. Then here is how to answer all three.

The channel a client chooses is an instruction

A client who texts you has made a choice, and it is a choice about the answer. A text is sent from a sofa, with a phone in one hand, to get a short answer now. An email is sent from a desk, to be read at a desk, and the sender expects to wait. So the channel tells you three facts before you have read the message. They are where the answer should arrive, how long it should be, and how soon. The course’s rule is to answer all three the way they were sent. This course already gives the same rule for an assistant who asks whether you are free. You reply in the form they asked for.

The reason is the same one that says to match how formal or casual a client is. An answer in the client’s channel asks nothing of them. An answer in a different channel asks them to go and find it. Ana did not have to decide whether a text was a proper way to ask, because she had already decided. What she got back asked her to open her email, read six sentences, and pick a time from three. The answer was in there. The work of getting to it was hers.

A travel adviser books a £50,000 trip on WhatsApp because that is where his clients write

Alex Lavender runs Seven Icons, a travel agency whose clients include England footballers and television presenters. In 2021 he told Travel Weekly that most of his bookings happen on WhatsApp. Many of his clients, the agency says, would rather write there than call or email. They do not want a long itinerary before they book. “Bookings can be done in 15 minutes on text,” he said. The agency regularly quotes trips of £10,000 or more on WhatsApp. “There are clients I’ve never spoken to on the phone, only on WhatsApp.”

One booking was a trip with private jets for a footballer and his fiancée, at £50,000. “We ended up speaking on the phone but most conversations were on WhatsApp,” he said. He put the rule in one sentence. “If you’ve not got your travel advisor on WhatsApp what’s the point of having a travel advisor?”

Measured against this lesson, two parts of his account are the method. He answers where his clients write, and the £50,000 booking moved to the phone while the rest stayed on WhatsApp. One part is his own. “I get messages from 5am to 11pm, but I always reply,” he said. Those hours are his choice for his clients, and they are not the rule.

A client measures the gap before reading a word

In 2011, Yoram Kalman and Sheizaf Rafaeli published a study in the journal Communication Research. They gave 55 business school students, whose average age was 36, a short description of a job candidate. In the description, the candidate had been sent an email. In different versions, he answered after a day, after two weeks, or not at all in over a month. When the candidate had made a good impression, the two-week reply and the silence both lowered what the readers thought of him. That included how believable they found him. The readers who were told he had not replied at all were far less likely to recommend him. It was 19% against 57% for the one-day reply.

Those were students judging a job candidate on paper, and the step to a client judging you is the course’s own. Here is the step. The gap before your reply is the first part of your answer the client gets. They get it whether or not you have written anything yet. A client who texted at twenty to seven and heard nothing by bedtime has had an answer. It said that her message was one of many. Nothing in the email Elin sent on Monday could take that back, because the email arrived after the gap had been measured.

A survey of 1,200 consumers found that an hour satisfies nine in ten

Jeff Toister, who advises companies on customer service, surveyed more than 1,200 consumers in April 2018. He asked how quickly they expected a business to answer an email. The single most common answer was one day, from 43% of them. A business that answers within a day meets only 56% of them, though, because the rest wanted something faster. An answer within four hours meets 70%, and an answer within an hour meets 89%. For a message sent to a business on Facebook, he found the same hour, with 17% wanting it faster still. The age group that wanted the fastest answer to an email was the oldest in his survey, the baby boomers.

Those people were writing to companies, and the step to your client is the course’s own. The lesson takes the hour as the working rule for a text or a message during your working day. An email gets an answer the same day. An hour is not the time it takes to write the answer. It is the longest wait that still meets what nine in ten of the people in his survey expected.

A piano teacher’s rule for a hard message is to pick up the phone

Wendy Stevens writes for piano teachers on the site ComposeCreate. She published seven rules for texting and emailing the parents of her students. Her fifth is “Call them when the conversation is high-stakes or needs de-escalation.” She admits she hates it. “I know that I can communicate more clearly in an email,” she writes. “But, emails are notoriously bad about communicating the wrong spirit and the wrong emotion.” A text or an email, she writes, “usually only makes a highly charged situation worse.” She adds one allowance. “You don’t have to call them right away.”

Her seventh rule is about the other edge, the text typed without care. A mother writes that she is not sure her daughter should enter the competition. She is worried about the girl, and she asks to talk for a few minutes today. The teacher answers, “yep.” A reply like that, Stevens writes, tells the parent that the teacher did not “care enough about the recipient to put the effort into” it. The parent can think, in her words, “If they are too lazy to type a proper response, what are they doing or not doing in my kids’ music lesson?”

Measured against this lesson, her two rules mark the two edges of a text. A text is short, and “yep” is not short. It is empty, one word to a worried mother with no name on it. The worry in that mother’s message was the reason to move to the phone, and the mother had asked for it. The lesson adds one step to Stevens’s rule, as its own suggestion. Text first to ask when a call would suit. A call that arrives unannounced interrupts whatever the client was doing, and a text lets them pick the minute.

A wedding planner who would not take texts, and the sentence of hers to keep

Debbie, who writes for other planners on the site Planner’s Lounge, posted in 2012 about texting. “I do not allow clients to text me about event planning tasks until the day of the wedding or event,” she wrote. The reason was her evenings. “We had clients in the past who would text us at 11pm at night with random wedding planning ideas or questions.” For planners who do text, she gives one rule. “Set the expectation in your contract about texting,” with the hours clients are welcome to text, “from 9am-5pm or whatever works for you.”

Her first choice is the one this lesson argues against. A planner who takes no texts asks every client who texts to move. What bothered her was the hour, not the channel, and the hour can be set without giving up the channel. The second part of her post does that, and it is the part to keep. The hours go in the first email or the agreement, once, so the client knows when a text gets its answer.

One reader who commented on her post, Rachel Moger, puts her phone away after dinner. When a client’s text comes in the evening, she sometimes waits until the next day, and sometimes sends, “I’ll get back with you on this in the morning!” That sentence is a reply. It can go within the hour, it says when the full answer comes, and it costs ten seconds. The client has what they were waiting for, which is to know when they will know.

Why sending everything by text goes wrong

Imagine an interior designer named Beatriz Alcántara whose client, Anna Kowalczyk, first wrote to her by text and has texted ever since. Beatriz has learned to answer where her clients write, and she does. In March, Anna texts to ask what the second phase, the two bedrooms, would cost. Beatriz is on site, and over the next hour she answers in five texts. The fee, the dates the painters can start, her deposit terms, a choice of two headboards, and a photo of a fabric. Anna reads them between meetings and writes, “Great, let me talk to Piotr.”

That evening her husband asks what the bedrooms will cost. Anna scrolls up through 60 texts, finds the fee, and cannot find the dates. She takes screenshots of three of the texts and sends them to him. Piotr reads a price with no sentence around it and a deposit he does not understand. He asks her to get it all in writing. Anna texts Beatriz, “Could you email all that over?” Beatriz writes the email the next morning. By then the painters’ March start has gone to another job. The first Piotr saw of Beatriz was a number with nothing around it.

Beatriz answered in the right channel at the right speed, and she put into it what the channel cannot hold. A text thread is where a question gets answered. It is not where a fee is kept, because nobody can find it there a week later. The version that works answers the text and names the email. “Hi Anna, the two bedrooms come to about $28,000, and the painters can start on the 17th. I’ll email it all tonight so you and Piotr have it in one place.” The text answers within the hour. The email stands on its own for the person it is forwarded to.

Answering within the hour is not being on call

Many professionals read “within the hour” and see their evenings going. The worry is that a tutor who answers texts at ten at night soon has clients who text at ten at night.

The hour runs inside the hours you have told the client about. The sentence Debbie puts in her contract sets them once. Outside those hours, a text gets a sentence like Rachel Moger’s, saying the answer comes in the morning, or nothing until then. The client who was told your hours is not waiting. Lavender answers from five in the morning until 11 at night, and those are his hours, not yours. The rule is smaller. Inside your working day, a text gets its answer, or a sentence saying when, within the hour. Elin answered Ana at ten to seven because she was at the table with her phone, and it took 20 seconds. If she had been at a concert, “Hi Ana, I’ll check the diary in the morning and text you by nine” would have done the same work.

How to answer in the channel the client chose

1. Answer where the client wrote. A text gets a text, an email gets an email, and a voicemail gets a call back. For example, a private chef whose client texts to ask whether Friday’s dinner can move to Saturday texts back. He does not send an email.
2. Write a text at a text’s length. Answer the question, use the name the client used, and keep the warmth of their message. One to three sentences is the course’s suggestion, because the client sent one to three. For example, a photographer whose client texts, “Hi Rafael! Can we push the shoot to 4?” writes, “Hi Leah, 4 is fine. The light is better then anyway. See you at the house.”
3. Inside your working hours, answer a text or a message within the hour. When you cannot answer the question in that hour, send the sentence that says when you will. For example, a personal trainer can write, “Hi Marcus, with a client until 2. I’ll check Thursday and text you by 2:15.”
4. Tell every new client, once, when you answer texts. The sentence goes in your first email or your agreement. For example, a home organizer can write, “Text me whenever it suits you. I answer between eight and six, and by nine the next morning after that.”
5. When the client will need to find the answer again, give the short answer by text. Send the rest by email that day. Say in the text that the email is coming. The fee, the dates, and the terms belong in the email, written for the person it will be forwarded to. For example, a florist texts, “Yes, the 20th is free. I’ll email the quote tonight so you have it to hand.”
6. When a message needs more than three sentences, or has worry or anger in it, text to ask when you can call. For example, a coach whose client texts that she is “not sure this is working” writes, “I’d rather talk this one through. Are you free for ten minutes at four, or tomorrow morning?”
7. Write the client’s channel on the client’s page, with how fast they answer. Then the next message you send goes where they will see it.

Next: You will see how to write a proposal that opens with the client’s situation and offers one or two choices.