- Consent is per-contact and per-channel, and it is not implied by someone filling in a form for something else.
- Calling windows follow the contact's local time, not yours.
- Opt-out has to work everywhere at once — one list, enforced centrally.
This is not legal advice, and we are not your counsel. It is a plain-language map of the four things that decide whether an outbound dial or text is allowed, written by the people who had to encode them.
01Consent is narrower than you think
The trap is treating a lead record as permission. Somebody handing over a phone number to see a listing has given you a phone number; whether they have agreed to be called by an automated system, or texted, is a separate question with a separate answer per channel.
So we store consent per contact and per channel, we never pre-tick a box, and the record shows you which lanes are open before you pick up the phone rather than after. A contact with no consent is not deleted and not hidden — it is marked targetable, not callable, which is a real and useful state.
02Calling windows are the contact's, not yours
The most common accidental violation is a perfectly reasonable 8:30 PM dial from an office two time zones east of the person answering. The rule follows the contact.
Held attempts do not vanish. They queue for the next legal window and show up on a morning receipt, so the honest answer to what happened to that lead is on screen rather than in somebody's memory.
03Opt-out has to be one switch
Suppression that lives inside a single campaign is not suppression. When someone opts out, it has to hold across every automation, every sequence, every agent, and every enthusiastic new hire importing a spreadsheet — which means it has to be enforced centrally, below the level where anyone configures anything.
04Attempt caps, and stopping on purpose
Persistence is a virtue right up until it becomes a pattern of conduct. Per-contact caps put a hard end on the sequence, and — this is the part teams underestimate — the system says out loud that it stopped, and why. A lead that quietly fell off the end of a list is indistinguishable from a lead nobody worked.