Report
2025 State of Business Texting Report
Business texting has been a steadily-growing channel—we can see this clearly from the texting service provider point of view.
But what do things look like for the businesses and customers that brands like Text Request serve? That’s what we’ve set out to answer in this year’s 2025 State of Business Texting Report.
More specifically, we’re trying to answer questions like:
What do businesses text for?
What do consumers want from these experiences?
What’s actually working these days?
How does all of this compare to what we’ve seen in past years?
So we surveyed 500+ North American adults across industries, ages, and job functions, and found the below actionable insights. We believe each point presented below can help you run your business more effectively while creating better customer experiences.
View past reports:
Businesses that text say your business should too.
97% of surveyed businesses who already text in some capacity would recommend texting for professional purposes to other businesses and organizations.
From this, we’re inferring that the bulk of businesses who text are receiving some benefit from it. The rest of this report covers what could be leading to these positive experiences, and what additional opportunities there may be for them and for you.
Customer service reigns as the top texting use case.
“Customer service” once again is the most common use case for business texting, with 75.9% saying they text for customer service. Why might this be?
For starters, it tends to be a catch-all. There are tons of customer communications that pop up on any given day. A customer may text the organization for a quick question or with some other need. The company may touch base with a customer via text about a previous service or request, or may need to share a quick update.
We’ve found that many people tend to think of all these moments, where it’s easier to send a text than make a call or wait for an email response, as “customer service,” and that’s what most businesses text for.
Businesses think they should be texting for online reviews and feedback.
Of those surveyed, only 25% reported that their organizations are currently texting for “reviews and feedback,” but an additional 32.3% said they think their company should be texting for reviews and feedback, making it the “most wished for” use case.
Our quantitative data is unclear on why companies want to text for reviews and feedback, but our qualitative data suggests two reasons:
Employees want a more systematic approach to gathering customer feedback so they can improve or make sure customers are taken care of
Organizations know that public reviews, such as Google reviews, help them bring in new customers, and that texting could be an effective way to get those reviews
Typically, when a company wants to do something but isn’t doing it yet, we find the reason is simply that management has not prioritized it. Our suggestion is to prioritize adding review management into your texting and other communications, so you can better serve existing customers and more easily bring in new ones.
Employees find texting to be a huge time saver.
66.8% of respondents shared that texting saves them 1-5 hours per week, 11.9% say texting saves them 10+ hours a week! That’s a lot of time saved, and that time certainly has a dollar value. How is texting saving so much time? The reasons vary, but tend to include factors like:
Sending a text is faster than making a phone call
Texting a contact list is faster than individually reaching out
Sharing pictures keeps employees from driving out to location or scheduling a meeting just to review a situation or document
Letting customers text the business leads to fewer inbound calls, so employees can get more work done around those customer interactions
Texts earn faster responses than emails and voicemail, reducing dead time on projects and in between tasks
What we’re seeing is that texting is largely used for administrative tasks and for functions that are typically viewed as cost centers, such as customer service, scheduling, and dispatching. These are all great use cases, certainly — any benefit is notable — but there are also a handful of data points to suggest that texting could help businesses do more than just save time.
There’s opportunity to increase revenue by texting, too.
To reach this insight, we have to bring several data points together. Here’s a sampling:
Only 50% of those texting are texting with leads
31% of businesses currently text for “sales and lead generation,” while an additional 21.2% think they should
30% text for “marketing and promotions,” while an additional 27% think they should
37.7% text for “payments and collections,” while an additional 20.8% think they should
61.2% of respondents want to receive texts for payments and payment reminders
47.7% of respondents want marketing promotion and discount messages
72% of respondents want to receive texts from businesses and other organizations
83.2% of texts are read within 30 minutes
We just threw a lot of stats at you — here’s what we’re interpreting all of this to mean.
Relatively few companies are texting for revenue producing activities (payments, sales, marketing), but a significant amount of people want the kinds of messages that would help companies increase revenue (payment reminders, sales request follow-ups, promotions). If companies were to text for these reasons, they would also likely see a faster impact on revenue than they would from other channels.
We call that an opportunity.
Our suggestion is to consider a periodic SMS marketing campaign to drum up new business from existing and previous customers (so long as they’ve opted into communications), and to begin sending friendly payment reminder texts to all those you invoice.
Proving a return on investment is still a challenge.
62.7% of respondents said that they are either not able to track a return on investment, or that tracking ROI is not applicable. This is roughly the same percentage we saw in our 2024 State of Business Texting Report, and it’s a worrisome trend to see, because we all know anecdotally:
That which gets measured gets improved
Employee performance improves when they know why they’re doing things a particular way
Every investment should have a return
What concerns us is that we can see all the benefits that texting brings to businesses from the above reporting and our years in this industry. But if organizations aren’t analyzing how their technology and operations are impacting their team and their profits, they’re going to miss out on opportunities. They may also underperform compared to their peers who are monitoring the returns of their efforts and investments.
Our recommendation is to start with one component that texting either does or could impact, and begin tracking its impact. Commonly tracked figures are noted in the graphic below. If you see significant impact in one area, you may want to expand your efforts and apply texting (or tracking) to another.
Businesses say texting is the most effective way to get a response.
58.9% of respondents said texting is the most effective channel for getting a response, followed by phone calls at 21.8% and email at 10.3%. Additionally, 68.4% of people report receiving 20 or fewer texts per day.
It’s not a guarantee, but texting stands out as a relatively easy channel to reach customers and other contacts quickly, because people are paying attention to their messages and it’s still not an overly saturated channel.
This data (and personal experience) shows us that if you want to get a quick response, text message is generally the way to go. Of course, there are all sorts of reasons why you might need a phone call, email, or other communications channel. Our suggestion, though, is to replace other options with texts where appropriate, and to send a text to set up the other channel. For instance, send a text to schedule a call or to confirm they received your email.
Not texting for appointments? You’re missing out.
69.5% of companies report texting for appointment scheduling, and this is where we tend to see the bulk of time savings.
When you text your customers, clients, or patients to set, confirm, and update appointments, you save a lot of time. It’s not groundbreaking, it just takes less time to send a text than to make a phone call and talk to the customer or leave a voicemail, especially if you text customers in batches. In practice, texting also leads to more kept appointments because you’re able to set, confirm, and update those appointments more effectively.
Just as important here, 84.8% of consumers want to receive appointment scheduling text message notifications. So, texting for appointments is common practice, leads to great benefits, and is something consumers want.
If appointments are part of your business, our suggestion is to begin replacing appointment scheduling and confirmation calls with text messages. If you currently send emails for this instead of phone calls, start sending texts, too. You should see an increase in engagement so you can keep more appointments while also saving time.
3 Final Takeaways
1. Start texting while it still gives you a competitive edge.
Business texting is becoming more and more common, because it's effective—but not yet saturated. 90% of texts are still read within 30 minutes of being sent, and 84% of people want texts from your business. Add SMS into your communications soon to get the full benefits from it.
Once you do start texting, remember to actually tell customers they can reach you that way. Adding a call-to-action, like “Text us!” on your website is one of the easiest ways to do this.
2. Look for revenue-producing opportunities to text.
Texting is often left for administrative tasks and quick touch points, and it's underutilized for sales conversations and marketing campaigns. That said, it can be the perfect attention-grabber to convert more leads into customers and to bring previous customers back. Texting flash promotions to all your engaged contacts, for example, can help you push your sales goals past the finish line at the end of a quarter.
3. Begin tracking time saved and money made via text message.
The best way to move the needle is by paying attention to what’s already working. How else will your team know where they’re supposed to focus their efforts? It’s also much easier to push for buy-in to try other use cases, once you can prove that what you’re currently texting for is working.
A quality business texting platform will include SMS reporting to help you track any returns your messages are bringing. For example, Text Request's usage report allows you to track the number of sent texts and their delivery rate across a set date, so you can compare the amount of time and stress you saved not making calls. It’s also possible to track new leads and appointments by using message tags, which are labels you can attach to individual texts to create records.
Methodology
Text Request surveyed working professionals across the United States and Canada in October of 2024. We used email, Text Request in-app notifications, and social media to request and gather survey responses, plus offered an entry to win one of five $100 raffle prizes as an incentive to complete the survey.
The survey was hosted on Typeform. Respondents were asked questions about text communications, or lack thereof, in their organizations, as well as their experiences with texting as a consumer, and lastly for demographic and contact information. We gathered 520 unique verified respondents. 92% reported being Text Request users.
2025 Texting Statistics Breakdown
Who is your business texting?
89% are texting with current customers
50% are texting with leads
48% are texting with employees
13% are texting with subscribers or non-customer contacts
What are you texting for?
76% are texting for customer service
70% are texting for appointment scheduling
61% are texting for alerts and notifications
41% are texting for employee communications
38% are texting for payments and collections
32% are texting for sales and lead generation
30% are texting for marketing and promotions
25% are texting for reviews and feedback
17% are texting for hiring and volunteer coordination
What’s your most successful use case for texting?
31% say customer service
25% say appointment scheduling
21% say alerts & notifications
9% say employee communications
4% say sales & lead generation
3% say payments & collections
2% say hiring & volunteer coordination
1% say reviews & feedback
2% say other
What use case do you think your company should text for?
32% say reviews & feedback
27% say marketing and promotions
25% say customer service
22% say alerts & notifications
21% say sales & lead generation
21% say payments & collections
21% appointment scheduling
13% say employee communications
10% say hiring & volunteering
6% say other
Which channel is most effective for getting a response?
59% say text message
22% say phone call
11% say email
4% say they don't know
3% say social media
1% say direct mail
1% say other
