My unironic answer is that like, idk, 50? 70? percent of Americans are only semi-literate and cannot write coherent text and struggle to read it.

Reasons they might prefer phone calls over emails:

• Email is a written record you have and can potentially use against them. They can tape phone calls but they know you're unlikely to tape them.

• It is easier to upsell something in a phone call than in an email.

• If there are more emails than there's time to answer, they get a backlog. If there are more phone calls than there is time to answer you get a backlog or give up altogether.

• It is easier to push a customer towards the resolution they want in a phone call than in an email.

in short everything will marginally dehumanize and extract value until the working class cannot reproduce itself and the world dies

Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.

—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx's Capital (1879)

well, if you commit to something in writing you can actually be held to it, unlike calls

And it's cheap/universal if you already have employees standing around (or more likely, actually working and just expected to multitask manning the phones). Plus its harder to automate and spam phone calls than emails. Plus for a long time a lot of people in the types of jobs tasked with answering phones for small businesses or locations of large ones, have been functionally tech-illiterate if not actually illiterate. You'd be surprised how many people over 50 never learned to computer (not like poorly, but almost completely unable)

Your shrink is probably worried about HIPAA compliance if in the US

What weirds me out is when customers prefer phone calls to emails. They want your assurance that an issue is being handled, they ask you to insist that you'll remember to call them back, and like, my note system is just scrawlings in Windows Notepad. If its in email, my boss sees it and I have a ledgerof undone tasks with timestamps. Asking me to manually do it all on the phone is begging me to lose it, or if I hate to, to intentionally fail to do it. That's much harder to do in email

Maybe it's some personal preference if it's not too large of an organization? Some people have different communication styles.

Sometimes it's quicker to verbally transmit a lot of information that isn't worth memorializing in the kind of detail or with enough context for it to make sense.

Some places it's a cultural practice around not documenting things so that it's less traceable later.

"wow thanks for calling great stuff really listening intently, could you put all that in an email? That'd be great"

back/forth exchanges are much faster on a phone call than email, turn around time is in seconds.

With small businesses, no one wants to hire someone to stand around checking the computer. Plus most people are terrible at writing emails.

Old people

Emails are so much more annoying to troubleshoot whenever I get a client sending us an email saying "X and Y is BROKEN". It's equally annoying on a phone call - but at least then I have them physically by the ear and can hear the lie in their voice when I go "and have you tried a different browser?"

Of course, because I don't really mind phone calls - they have become my responsibility so I am fully 100% with you that we need to switch fully to email.

I think you may be underestimating the labor required to respond to emails on the part of the business, depending on the task and what information is typically needed. I understand wanting a written record of things, but I get a lot of client emails that turn into ridiculous chains because people can't follow directions or things are harder to explain in text or a document is missing and it takes another 3 days for them to reply, etc, etc.

I've had people schedule meetings with me and those meetings come before I've ever even had a chance to see their email because of the volume we get. Then we resolve whatever it is in 5 minutes and don't have to worry about it anymore. I've also had people email me a laundry list of very complex questions that will take much more time to explain in writing and will definitely not be done promptly because I have 5 minutes between other meetings to write out a response to 1 out of 10 questions and it takes me that long to even parse all of what it is they are asking.

There's definitely situations wheres meetings should have been emails, but at least in my position, there's equally as many things that should have been a phone call or Zoom meeting or something instead.

EDIT: Ideally, email is for less complex questions or things that can wait a significant length of time (like 1 - 2 weeks in my position), where meetings/phone calls are for more urgent or complex situations. But this definitely isn't the reality.