Texting Clients is Bad For Business

For Designers!

Design Services and Rates Guide A FREE Resource for Your Interior Design Business

We value your privacy. We will never share or sell your information.

Are clients micromanaging you with non-stop texts at all hours of the day?

Does it feel impossible to stay organized and on top of projects when you’re communicating this way?

You’re not alone. In my early years as an interior designer, I thought texting would make communication easier. Instead, it opened the door to chaos, blurred boundaries, and lost revenue.

Today I’m sharing:

The one exception where I find it acceptable to text
The three reasons why texting clients is bad for your business
How it could be costing you up to $25,000 per year!

1. Setting Boundaries

When you text clients, you’re not setting clear boundaries or creating structure.

The expectation with a text is that you’ll reply immediately, but depending on what you’re doing or the time of day you receive a message, that’s not always realistic.

In my experience, if I don’t respond right away, texts can easily get buried. They get hidden amongst reminders for hair appointments, messages from my kids, and passcodes sent for logins.

This is one of the reasons why we include a no-texting policy in our Full Service Interior Design contract and outline our business hours, which are: 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday to Friday.

Setting these expectations upfront lets clients know that you have structure to your business and boundaries for how you work.

When they know this from the offset of the working relationship, you can manage their expectations and they are more likely to respect your time.

2. An Inefficient Way to Work

Text messages are messy.
They are not searchable, and they are easy to lose track of.
How are you supposed to organize all those texts?!

If a client texts you a photo of a rug or a backsplash tile, you have to pull yourself out of whatever you’re doing and get your head back into their project which takes time to refocus.

Feeling the need to respond immediately can easily disrupt your day and is not an efficient way to work on a project as a whole.

For full-service projects, we handle every detail, so piecemeal communication doesn’t fit into our workflow at any time.

Even with Designer By Your Side clients, I recommend keeping everything documented by email, or asking your client to save any questions, and ideas for when you next meet up.

We keep emails in our inbox until we’ve actioned them, and we have a 24-hour response time policy.

If in your initial discussions, you find out a client likes to text, explain to them the reasons why you find this to be an inefficient way to work. Most people understand once you share some stories of why you haven’t found texting to be a smart way to communicate with clients.

You could consider adding a question about this to your client questionnaire, which you would review at the initial consultation to start the conversation on this topic at that time.

While it’s never been an issue for us, if you find that a client is persistent in their request to text you, you must decide if you are willing to work that way and how best to manage it. However, be mindful of tracking for your time, and letting your client know how you bill for these messages.

If you don’t log your time, you could be losing a lot of money – which brings me to my next point -perhaps the most important and the one that can make you the most resentful when not managed properly.

3. Thousand$ Lost

If you know me, you know that I like to do the math. The numbers can add up in a way you never considered, and it’s very eye-opening.

Let’s take a look and see how much money you could be missing out on by not accurately billing for all those text messages.

If you’re spending just one hour per week texting with clients and not billing for that time, and you charge $150/hour, you’re losing $7,800 a year
Now imagine you have three clients you do this with – that’s nearly $25,000 a year in lost income

It’s nearly impossible to accurately track how much time you spend texting back and forth with clients.

When you work by email, it’s easier to log your time, document your communication, and bill accurately.

Texting is not only disorganized, it’s expensive.

Another example of quick calculations to estimate revenue for hours worked can be found in this blog about Designer For A Day.

Two Text Exceptions

There are some exceptions where texting can be helpful:

Letting a client know you’re running late for a meeting.
Sending a quick reminder to check their email inbox for a proposal or invoice.

These are quick, and purposeful texts that don’t turn into a full conversation.

Final Thoughts

By implementing these three simple strategies, you can minimize the chaos, streamline your billing, and improve communication with your clients.

The key is setting expectations from the start.

Explain why you have a no-texting policy. Share how it protects the project, the timeline, and their investment.

Clear boundaries = smoother projects, happier clients, and a business that’s easier to manage—and way more profitable.

I’m Claire Jefford, here to help you gain clarity in your interior design business. Let me transform your design business with bigger projects, better clients, and higher profits.

Comment below and tell me how you deal with this – do you text with clients, and are you billing for that time?

Free Resources

For more Claire-ity in structuring your interior design business, here are some more resources I have to help:

Welcome Packet Template

Making an outstanding first impression goes a long way.

The Ultimate Welcome Package is an essential branding tool to layer into your onboarding process for establishing trust with new clients – which is the key to better client relationships.