We began our tour last time with a look at what you can do on the Plivo console to monitor and manage our SMS API. The series continues here with a similar survey for our Voice API.

The Voice menu overview

To get to the Voice menu, visit the Plivo console and click on the second icon.

The console displays the Voice Overview page, which shows some basic usage information.

Advanced Insights

Moving to the next menu item takes you to the Advanced Insights page. It shows information that can help you identify call quality issues so you can fix them quickly.

XML and PHLO applications

The next menu choice brings you to a list of the Plivo XML applications and PHLOs associated with your account.  In Plivo parlance, an application is a set of answer, hangup, and message URLs that you use to control what happens to your incoming calls and messages, while our PHLO visual workflow design tool lets you build applications graphically. Clicking on an application name brings you to a screen of details about the application.

The entries in the Voice section of this page define URLs the application looks at in the event of an incoming call to that number or when the call is hung up. Upon receipt of an incoming call Plivo makes a synchronous HTTP request to your application using the URL specified in the Primary Answer URL field. The API expects an XML document in response. Plivo also sends a few parameters with the HTTP request that your application can act upon before responding.

If there were a URL specified for messaging it would work the same way. You can read more about the process in our documentation.

Endpoints

The next menu choice is Endpoints, which displays a list of SIP endpoints associated with your account. A SIP endpoint can be any IP phone, mobile phone, wireless device, or PC that uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to perform communications operations.

Logs

Click on the Logs submenu to bring up the Voice log: a list of every voice API URL call made, which you can filter a number of ways or export for analysis elsewhere.

When you click on a call entry on the log page, you can see details about the call.

That’s a ton of information about the call itself — and if that doesn’t tell you enough, well, there’s more. A note in the last box on the page directs you to the call debug log entries. The debug log contains details for all callbacks that Plivo sends.

With all the information in the logs you should be able to understand any issues you encounter. (But if you need help, our support team is always here for you.)

In addition to call logs, we give you access to recording and transcription logs.

If you click on an item in the log, you can see details about that item.

Settings

The final group of menu items falls under the category of Settings. The first setting entry determines whether to use Call Insights. Because the feature is still in beta and therefore free to everyone, it’s enabled by default.

The Push Credentials screen lets you store the credentials you need if you’re working with Plivo’s iOS SDK or Android SDK. Once you have credentials issued by Apple and Google you can enter them here.

Geo Permissions can help you protect your account from fraud by restricting the set of countries your account can call. Get more information from our documentation.

Finally, Other Settings lets you enable destination number validation (which can give you better delivery rates and cost savings from not sending messages to numbers that are incapable of accepting them), enable HTTP Basic Auth on all GET recording media requests for enhanced security, and providing consent for Plivo to store and have access to logs and media packet capture files.

All about the console

That’s our quick tour of the Voice menus. To dig deeper, visit your console page and see what your data looks like. Also check out our other console tours of the SMS, Zentrunk, Number Lookup, and Phone Numbers menus. If you have any questions, you can find the answers in our documentation or on our support portal.

Outbound dialing? It’s more than a fancy way of saying making a phone call. Even though phones haven’t used a rotary dial in decades, we still dial in the word to refer to automation software for making calls: outbound dialers (OBD).

OBD software is commonly found in contact centers and sales engagement platforms, where it improves staff efficiency by reducing manual repetitive outbound calling, so that sales agents and customer service representatives can contact more customers within a given period of time.

In addition to serving as a tool for live representatives, outbound dialers can also be fully automated to deliver recorded telemarketing calls. An OBD can deliver a voice message — useful for things like product promotions; announcements, notifications, and alerts; and one-time passwords (OTP) used for two-factor authentication (2FA). A more sophisticated multilevel OBD can accept input from call recipients, like an interactive voice response (IVR) system, and so can be used for things like sending payment reminders with an option to make payments and gathering product or service feedback.

There’s also the hybrid approach, where an OBD makes an automated call, but the call recipient can press a key and be patched over to a live agent.

Why not use text messaging, which is many people’s preferred channel for communication nowadays, instead of dialing up a voice call? Voice messages can convey more information than a single character-limited text message. Depending on where you are and what number type you use, voice can be less expensive too — and making one voice call will almost always be less expensive than sending multiple SMS messages. Voice is also better for certain kinds of calls that demand a personal touch.

OBD use cases

Outbound dialers can save time in a number of use cases.

• Alerts and notifications

When companies need to tell a cohort of customers about a change that people might not be happy about, a voice call can provide more empathy than a text message. An airline might use OBD to send notice of flight delays; a salon might alert customers when a stylist calls in sick.

• Surveys and feedback

Most people don’t have the patience to provide feedback for you if you ask them via email or SMS, but a quick automated call where they can speak answers or press keypad keys is likely to get better engagement. (Quick is key.)

• Financial conversations

Discussions about things such as overdue bills are often better handled by a live agent than an impersonal text or email. OBDs can automatically dial phone numbers from a predefined list, eliminating the need for agents to manually dial.

Dialing modes

Different use cases lend themselves to different OBD modes. Call center managers generally refer to three modes: predictive, preview, and progressive.

1. Predictive

Predictive dialers can make many calls at one time. When someone answers, they’re connected with the next available agent. If no one answers, the software disconnects and moves to the next number in its calling queue. The goal is to maximize the productivity of call center agents by minimizing the time they spend waiting between calls and increasing the likelihood of reaching a live person on the other end of the line.

Predictive dialing is suitable for high-volume use cases with many available agents, in which agent efficiency is a priority, such as customer service follow-up, telemarketing, market research, and outbound sales prospecting.

A possible downside of predictive OBD is the risk of “dead air” for the called party. Predictive OBDs algorithmically determine when they should make a call based on metrics such as average call duration, abandonment rates, and agent skill levels. When they get the timing wrong, a call recipient can end up on the phone before an agent is available; most likely they’ll hang up.

2. Preview

With preview dialing, agents signal when they’re ready for a call. The dialer presents information about the contact being called, such as a customer name, account details, and previous call history. An agent can review the material before initiating a call.

Preview dialing can be advantageous in situations where a personalized approach is needed, such as in sales or collections calls, and when dealing with complex issues that require a full understanding of the contact situation. However, it results in lower call volume and lower efficiency than predictive OBD, as agents spend more time preparing for each call and manually initiating the dialing process.

3. Progressive

Progressive dialing, also known as power dialing, is similar to preview dialing in that agents indicate when they’re ready for the next call. The difference is that the agents receive information about the customer while a call is being made, rather than beforehand. This speeds up the outgoing call process, but gives less time for the agents to prepare.

Progressive dialers help agents maximize their time spent on the phone. This mode strikes a balance between the efficiency of predictive outbound dialing and the control offered by preview outbound dialing. It minimizes the risk of dropped or abandoned calls while still offering a degree of personalization and control for the agents.

Sales teams often use progressive dialing when they’re looking to renew or upsell customers.

OBD advantages

Whichever dialing mode you use, you’re likely to gain several benefits from OBD.

• Efficient call routing

OBDs can intelligently route calls to the appropriate agents based on factors such as skill level, availability, and language preferences. This ensures that customers are connected to the most suitable agent, improving the overall customer experience.

• Scalability

OBD software is designed to scale with a call center’s needs, making it suitable for growing organizations or those whose business cycle is seasonal. As the number of agents or call volume increases, the software can be adjusted to handle the growth.

• Real-time monitoring and reporting

Outbound dialers provide real-time monitoring and reporting tools to track agent performance, call outcomes, and other essential metrics. These insights enable call center managers to make data-driven decisions to optimize their operations.

• Compliance management

OBD software can include built-in compliance features to help call centers adhere to industry regulations and avoid potential legal issues. Compliance requirements may include call recording, call disposition tracking, and adherence to do not call (DNC) lists.

• CRM integration

Outbound dialers can be integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, allowing agents to access customer information and history during calls. This integration helps agents deliver a personalized and efficient service, enhancing the customer experience.

However you use them, outbound dialers can help call centers automate and optimize their outbound calling processes, enabling them to enhance productivity, improve customer satisfaction, and elevate overall business performance.

Plivo’s Voice API is a great tool for writing OBD software — or if you prefer your outbound dialing pre-canned, we offer Contacto, a cloud call center application, and Sellular, a sales engagement platform for prospecting at scale.

The carriers responsible for toll-free text messaging in North America mandate verification of toll-free numbers before you can use a toll-free number to send application-to-person (A2P) messages. This change aligns toll-free messaging with 10DLC and short codes, which already have business verification measures in place. The intent is to ensure that message senders on all services are reviewed and that businesses that send messages are documented and verified.

The verification process involves the carrier responsible for verification reviewing the submitted information and either approving or rejecting the application. The process can take up to two weeks.

Irrespective of the volumes of application-to-peer (a2p) messages you intend to send on toll-free numbers, you must verify each toll-free number.

Plivo recommends that you begin sending messages only after a toll-free number has been verified.

How to get toll-free numbers verified

Verified numbers are subject to the least amount of filtering — but that doesn’t mean customers can use them in unapproved ways. All messaging must still comply with best practices for A2P messaging and must not be used for any use case that is not allowed by carriers in the US or Canada.

Once verified, a number does not need to be re-verified for the same use case in the future. If you want to use any given toll-free number for a different or an additional use case, you should submit a new verification request. Failure to do so can be considered noncompliance by the carriers and may result in your messaging services being suspended.

We’ve written about the FCC’s mandate for US telecom service providers (TSP) to implement STIR/SHAKEN — two technical frameworks that attempt to authenticate calling numbers and measure trust in displayed caller names. We’ve been remiss at noting that Canada too has jumped on the STIR/SHAKEN train.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) Decision 2021-123 “directs telecommunications service providers (TSPs) to implement STIR/SHAKEN to authenticate and verify caller identification (ID) information for Internet Protocol (IP)-based voice calls as a condition of offering and providing telecommunications services, effective 30 November 2021.” In other words, any Canadian carrier whose calls traverse IP networks in whole or in part must implement STIR/SHAKEN.

On May 31, 2022, TSPs were required to file their first post-implementation STIR/SHAKEN status reports with the CRTC. Reports are filed every six months.

An end to call spoofing?

Unfortunately, STIR/SHAKEN doesn’t guarantee that no calls will be spoofed. Even if calls are made and terminated on IP networks, if they’re interconnected via time-division multiplexing (TDM) on the public switched telephone network (PSTN), STIR/SHAKEN attribution information won’t be carried over. And calls from numbers outside the US and Canada, from countries that haven’t implemented STIR/SHAKEN, won’t carry attestation information either.

Still, it’s a start, and we expect more accurate attribution information on a higher percentage of voice calls as carriers do a better job of implementing the protocols.

While STIR/SHAKEN technology can uncover call spoofing, it doesn’t stop it or reduce the number of times it occurs. That will take additional standards that have yet to be written. For now, consumers can rely on smartphone apps like Truecaller, Hiya, and a host of others that let people identify incoming calls as possible spam and potentially automatically block them or send them to voicemail.

Plivo has been compliant with STIR/SHAKEN regulations since they rolled out, so you can be sure that any calls you make using Plivo’s Voice API and phone numbers rented from Plivo will have the highest possible levels of attestation

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) mandates that all organizations that want to send SMS to phones in India via domestic messaging register on distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms. Sender registration and whitelisting is designed to curb unsolicited commercial communication (UCC), control promotional spam, and reduce SMS fraud.

The size of the commercial communication market in India makes spam a giant problem. The country has 1.2 billion mobile subscribers who send and receive more than 30 billion messages per month. Not all of those messages are welcome, however.

DLT is a blockchain-based registration system that, for TRAI, records details about organizations, headers, consent information, and message templates. By following the rules around DLT registration, businesses that engage in telemarketing can ensure that their messages reach their target recipients.

We’ve written a post in our support portal that walks Indian businesses through the process of registering using any of four telecom providers’ portals. The process involves

1. Obtaining an Entity ID
2. Registering headers
3. Registering consent templates and content templates

Step 1 — Register an Entity ID

An Entity ID is a 19-digit number that uniquely identifies a business. Once you’ve obtained it, you can use your Entity ID for all future header and template registrations. You’ll need several documents to obtain an Entity ID:

• Business PAN, a government-issued permanent account number. You can register for a PAN online.
• GST or TAN certificate. GST stands for Goods and Service Tax, and TAN is Tax Deduction and Collection Account Number. As you can for a PAN, you can register for a GST or TAN certificate online.
• Letter of Authorization allowing an individual to register on behalf of the business.
• Government-issued ID for the authorized individual.

Step 2 — Register headers

Once you’ve obtained an Entity ID you should register your headers. Headers are simply sender IDs for the numbers you plan to use to send text messages. To avoid confusion among message recipients, you may not use look-alike headers that differ only in their use of uppercase and lowercase letters.

Step 3 — Register templates

The next step is to register consent templates and content templates. A consent template is a standard message that’s sent to users to get their consent to receive communications from enterprises. There’s no limit on the number of consent templates you can create. After consent templates are approved by the registrar, you can link them to content templates.

A content template is the actual text of an SMS message. Content templates can include variables, so you can show where specific values are supposed to go in your messages; for example, “your verification code is {#var#}.”

There are four types of content templates:

• Transactional — messages that contain a one-time password (OTP) required to complete a banking or credit or debit card transaction initiated by a bank customer
• Service implicit — any message arising out of customers’ actions or their existing relationship with the enterprise, and that is not promotional
• Service explicit — messages that require explicit consent from customers. This category includes service messages that don’t fall under the service-implicit category.
• Promotional — messages intended to promote or sell products, goods, or services. Service content mixed with promotional content is treated as promotional.

Our support post shows examples of each, and presents a list of dos and don’ts for both consent templates and content templates. For consent templates, for instance, choose a logical short name for each consent template; that’ll help you choose the right consent template to associate with content templates. In your consent template, include the brand name that’s relevant to the scope of the consent, along with a complete description of what you’re asking consent for. For example, “We would like to send marketing offers and events to our registered customers” or “We need your consent to send you messages about your account as well as marketing offers.”

After consent templates are approved by the registrar, you can link them to content templates in promotional or service categories. As with consent templates, use relevant and recognizable names for content templates. You can insert a variable placeholder {#var#} to stand in for values such as dates, amounts, account numbers, names, and one-time passwords. Each content template may be associated with only a single header; don’t use the same content template with multiple headers.

Making registration easy

We’ve done our best to make the multi-step DLT registration process as simple as possible. If you follow the instructions in our support post you should have no trouble registering your business, so you can send text messages to domestic Indian phone numbers in compliance with TRAI DLT regulations.

The good news is that DLT registration is working. Since the government imposed its mandate, more than 2.5 million principal entities have obtained IDs. They’ve registered more than 600,000 headers and generated more than 5,500,000 approved message templates. All of this activity has yielded a welcome reduction in the number of customer complaints about registered telemarketers.

Who’s having a great year? This company. We just learned that we won not one but three 2023 APPEALIE SaaS + Software Awards.

• Overall SaaS Award winner in the Development + DevOps category for Small Business + Mid-Market
• Overall SaaS Award winner in the Development + DevOps category for Enterprise
• SaaS Customer Success Award winner

If you think this sounds like old news, that might be because we won the Overall SaaS Award in the Development + DevOps category for Small Business + Mid-Market last year — and the year before that. It’s a threepeat!

The Customer Success Award is new. Winners are “recognized for their demonstrated excellence and customer outcomes,” according to the APPEALIES. The pride we take in supporting our users translates into happy customers.

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Or it might be because we just announced that we won a 2023 Stevie Award.

New and noteworthy

Why did the APPEALIES choose Plivo? Cited features include:

• Number masking lets ride-hailing and delivery customers and providers communicate without revealing their real phone numbers to each other.
• Improved data filtering on the console gives customers instant access to their most important messaging and numbers data.
• Customers in India can receive invoices, make payments, and receive payment receipts in rupees (INR).
• US customers can get information about the level of STIR attestation for each call via the API responses and callbacks or via Call Detail Records downloaded from the console.
• Our new iOS and Android mobile SDKs are built over a WebRTC framework, which offers better call quality and improved developer integration experience.
• We reduced call transcription prices by 37%. Call transcription now starts at $0.0095 per minute. Transcription accuracy parallels industry leaders but at far better prices.
• By default, Plivo expires messages that remain in the messaging queues after three hours. Customers now have the ability to set a custom message expiry interval for their SMS and MMS messages. Why do senders set an expiry interval? Some text messages have a limited useful lifetime — if they’re not delivered within a certain period, they become useless. Expired messages are not charged to customers.

We appreciate the recognition, which confirms Plivo’s quality. This award pairs nicely with the notice that we were named the top overall CPaaS by G2 users in the most recent Grid® Report for Communication Platform as a Service for Spring 2023.

Plivo has won a Bronze Stevie Award in the Platform as a Service category.

For those not familiar with them, the Stevie Awards were created in 2002 “to honor and generate public recognition of the achievements and positive contributions of organizations and working professionals worldwide.” The American Business Awards, the type of Stevie that Plivo won, are open to US organizations and feature a variety of categories, including startup of the year, executive of the year, and best new product or service of the year. This year the Stevies received more than 3,700 nominations for the awards.

What made Plivo stand out from the pack? Stevie judges cited improvements over the last year in Plivo’s 10DLC features. 10DLC numbers, as you know if you send text messages in the US, are standard US local phone numbers that carriers approve for application-to-person (A2P) text messaging. To use them, organizations must register their brands, declare their use cases, and link phone numbers. This registration process lets carriers know who’s sending what kinds of messages and ultimately protects message recipients from unwanted spam texts.

Continuous improvement for the win

A year ago, to register for 10DLC, Plivo customers had to provide our support team with relevant information and wait for results. Since then, Plivo has added 10DLC registration features to the console, allowing customers to register their companies (brands) and use cases (campaigns) themselves and link their long code numbers to campaigns. Through the console they can also get transparency into the 10DLC process; they can

• View 10DLC registration status of a number
• Check what campaign is associated with a number
• See what throughput is allocated for a number by carrier

In addition, Plivo created a 10DLC API that lets reseller customers automate registration for multiple 10DLC brands and campaigns.

What the judges said

Stevie judges were impressed with the simplicity of the console interface — “impressed with the enhancements to automate workflows and the details on 10DLC,” were one judge’s exact words. “Customer experience is indeed the key.”

Another judge commented, “Easy to use and cost-effective service with great customer support and comprehensive documentation.”

And a third said simply, “This is a great connectivity product for enterprises.”

We appreciate the kind words. We think we’ve earned them. If you’re a Plivo customer and you agree, please share that with the Stevie Award team and help us earn their People’s Choice Award for Favorite New Product. At the top of the form enter the short code I706L or click on Platform as a Service and then tap us.

What is Call Quality? How to Monitor it in Your Contact Center

These days, contact center managers can find answers to questions about call strategy with a much more analytically rigorous approach than a reflection on their personal experience.  

Thanks to the proliferation of cloud contact center solutions, collecting and analyzing conversational data from calls between customers and agents has never been easier.

With call recordings and call metrics, contact center managers can routinely identify low-quality calls, listen to them, spot weaknesses, and help the agent and team address these shortcomings through personalized training plans and alterations to call processes and scripts.  

In this article, we’ll explain what call quality is, why monitoring it is so essential for contact centers, and how busy managers can do it efficiently and intelligently with the help of technology.

What is Call Quality?

Call quality is a measure of the effectiveness of phone call conversations between a business’s contact center agents and its customers.

Each contact center has its own set of standards that determine call quality. But, in general, high-quality conversations are those in which the contact center agent is polite and helpful and leaves the customer satisfied with a clear solution to their problem.

Call quality monitoring, on the other hand, is the ongoing process of gathering data about customer service phone calls and analyzing that data to find ways to improve a contact center’s performance.

Importance of Call Quality Monitoring in a Contact Center

When customer service has such a large effect on customer experience, sales, and customer retention, contact center managers have to work towards optimizing their team’s performance on the phones, and call quality monitoring is the most effective way to do that. The following analogy will explain why.

A top-tier sports coach adjusts their training regiment based on the weaknesses they perceive through closely observing players in action. They know that assigning dribbling practice to a forward with already dizzying foot skills is a failure to use training time as efficiently as possible.

The contact center manager must follow the same coaching strategy in order to consistently improve agent performance. They have to uncover the various weaknesses of each agent, as well as the overall team, through effective call quality monitoring.

By identifying shortcomings in how agents handle calls, the manager can give personalized training assignments or reference material to agents, such as a specific technical white paper or objection handling script.

Managers can also change their contact center processes to eliminate the shortcoming across the entire team.

For example, after diving into contact center analytics, you might find that calls tend to fail when customers ask about “technical issue X”. You could then educate their agents on that product problem and update the call script with language they can easily reference mid-call.

How Contact/Call Center Teams can Monitor Call Quality

The ultimate aim of call quality monitoring is to increase agent performance by identifying weaknesses in call handling and then implementing corrective action.

To monitor call quality, contact center managers set up systems to collect and analyze information about customer interactions to uncover insights about how to improve customer service.

They may use the following to collect information about customer calls:

• Call recordings
• Customer surveys
• Social media mentions
• Data from other channels — live chat, email, etc.

To visualize this in practice, imagine that you record all of the agents’ phone calls, along with the customer survey results about those conversations, in a contact center platform.

Whenever a customer leaves a poor review, you listen to the phone call with the agent, pinpoint the reasons why the call failed, and then instruct the agent on how to improve next time around.

If the issue is common enough, you may also update your team’s standard operating procedures or script to prevent it from happening again. You might also share the advice you gave the individual agent to the entire team in a team meeting.

As you can imagine, call quality monitoring gets tricky when there is a large number of calls to track. It’s impossible to listen to all of them, and difficult to tease out the most common flaws in agent call handling.  With that in mind, here are some best practices to follow to ensure you monitor call quality efficiently:

Automate Call Data Collection & Analysis

Call data consists of call recordings, live metrics, historical reporting, and other call-related metrics like average handle time (AHT).

Many companies use a cloud contact center solution to capture this data automatically during conversations. The software also helps them analyze that data, making it easier to identify calls that failed, as well as why they failed.

In sum, automating data collection and analysis with the right software is an essential step in creating a systematic approach to call quality monitoring.

Listen Critically to the Recordings

On their own, the metrics you collect through automation won’t give you the entire picture of how the agent, or your process, is falling short.

To truly understand the nature of the problem, you need to listen to call recordings, asking questions like the following:

• Is the agent following the script?
• What causes customer friction? Are there certain talking points that come before it?
• What types of questions is the agent asking?
• When does the call seem to fall apart?
• Were there any missed opportunities to provide clarity?
• Is it evident that the agent is lacking some fundamental knowledge about the product?

A close, critical listen to an agent’s conversation with a customer can uncover subtle issues with the agent’s technique that you can help them overcome to unlock their true potential.

Track the Impact of New Processes

Whenever you implement a new call handling process or make changes to your script, it’s crucial that you track the impact of that shift. That way, you’ll come to know if your plan is actually paying off, or if you need to go back to the drawing board.

To track the impact, compare team-wide metrics like average handle time or average CSAT from before and after the implementation. Ask yourself whether there is a significant bump in these numbers. If it’s succeeding, great job. If not, you may have misdiagnosed the issue.

Conclusion

Monitoring call quality with an eye toward improvement in agent performance is an essential practice for leaders in contact centers. Only through ongoing call quality measurement and analysis can true progress occur.

If you’re looking for a tool that will help you monitor call quality and bolster agent performance with features like call whispering and agent dashboards, check out how PlivoCX can help.

If you plan to send bulk text messages or make marketing voice calls — two common uses for Plivo’s SMS API and Voice API — you must gain consent from recipients before you launch your campaigns.

The requirement for consent has been in place for a long time, starting on the voice side. In the US, the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) put restrictions on telemarketing and set out consent rules. Without explicit consent from consumers, companies must adhere to strict solicitation rules and honor the National Do Not Call Registry. TCPA also sets forth consent rules for SMS. Telemarketing in the US is also subject to the 1995 Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), administered by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Meanwhile, the European Union has its own laws. The EU’s 2002 ePrivacy Directive states, in part, “The use of automated calling and communication systems without human intervention (automatic calling machines) … for the purposes of direct marketing may be allowed only in respect of subscribers or users who have given their prior consent.” The GDPR further codifies regulations around consent.

Other countries have other regulations. And in addition to country-specific laws, industry groups such as the CTIA also provide consent guidelines.

Many countries also maintain “do not disturb” databases of people who register their numbers to deny permission for businesses to send them unsolicited commercial communications. For instance, the US has a National Do Not Call Registry, while India has a National Customer Preference Register (NCPR), informally known as the Do Not Disturb registry. However, businesses are allowed to call consumers who have given express agreement to receive calls, even if their numbers are in the national do not call registry.

The key takeaway from all of these laws and guidelines is that businesses should send messages to customers only after receiving opt-in permission.

We don’t need to explain why these rules are in place, do we? People don’t want just anyone reaching out and giving them an electronic tap on the shoulder. They don’t want to have to waste time fighting off unsolicited attention. People want to maintain control of the communications they receive via electronic channels, no matter how well-intentioned those communications are.

How to manage consent

So if we’re all agreed that consent is A Good Thing as well as the law, how should we follow consent best practices?

• First, collect consumer consent yourself. Don’t use consent acquired from a third party — that’s prohibited in the US, and in some other countries as well.
• Make it easy for people to opt in. You can use keyword opt-in via text message (“text START to 75486 to subscribe to our notification services”), web opt-in via a form (perhaps displayed when consumers register for an account, or, old-school as it is, paper opt-in, by filling out a paper form at a store or kiosk. Notice that in all of these cases, the consumer explicitly contacts you before you contact them.

If you use a web form, make sure that consumers give their consent with a clear affirmative action. In other words, people must take a deliberate action to opt in — pre-ticked boxes don’t count as consent. And you can’t make opting in to messaging a prerequisite for purchasing goods and services — that’s prohibited.

Consent for voice calls must be expressed and informed. Under the TSR, consent is express if it’s affirmatively and unambiguously articulated by the consumer. Consent is informed when a consumer receives appropriate and relevant required disclosures prior to giving consent.

• When people opt in, send them (or, on a web page, display for them) a confirmation message that includes details about what they’ve opted in for. Mention the use case, possible charges, and whether they’ll get recurring messages. You should also tell them how to withdraw their consent — opt out, in other words.

Here’s an example of a good confirmation message to be sent via SMS:

Welcome to Plivo developer outreach. Reply HELP for help, STOP to cancel. Message and data rates may apply.

Carriers, mobile network operators (MNO), and cloud communications platforms like Plivo bear part of the responsibility of delivering potential spam to consumers, so they (we) are likely to suspend or terminate messaging services of any organization that fails to comply with opt-in guidelines.

How consumers can withdraw consent

So you’ve obtained consent — that’s great, but consent lasts only as long as your recipients want it to. You must allow users to opt out of your messages easily. To do that for SMS, provide opt-out instructions in your messages, particularly for informational, marketing, and promotional messages. Plivo recommends adding “Reply STOP to unsubscribe” or “reply STOP to cancel” to the end of your message.

Your systems must not send messages to contacts who have opted out. A general best practice is to send recipients a confirmation that they have been opted out and add instructions on how to opt back in; for example:

You replied with STOP, which blocks all the texts from this number. Text UNSTOP to receive messages again.

Not providing an opt-out option or sending people messages after they have opted out is another kind of violation that could result in the termination of your messaging campaigns.

Consent for recording

So far we’ve talked only about consent for marketing outreach, but there’s one more common case where consent is a concern: call recording. Some jurisdictions have strict consent laws that require you to obtain consent from all participants before recording calls; others require consent of at least one of the participants. Since you may not know where all parties are calling from, it’s good practice to follow the rules for the strictest cases.

If you plan to record phone calls, disclose that fact to your users and obtain consent from all participants beforehand, and keep a record of how you obtained consent. If a participant revokes consent, you must no longer record their calls.

Another consideration is where call recordings are stored. Plivo, for instance, stores call recordings in a cloud instance hosted in the US. Some countries prohibit data from leaving the country. Check your local requirements.

Determining what laws apply to call recording can be complicated when participants are in multiple states or countries. In today’s world, you can’t be 100% sure where a participant is calling from. Nevertheless, you must familiarize yourself with the laws and standards that apply to your business and use case so that you record calls in a legally compliant manner. Ultimately, you are responsible for ensuring that your business complies with all applicable laws and regulations.

We are not a lawyer

If you follow all of these guidelines, you’re on the right track for managing consent for both messaging and voice marketing. However, please don’t take this post as legal advice, and don’t imagine we’ve comprehensively covered the topic.

We’ve talked here only about US and EU policies here; plenty of Plivo customers live elsewhere in the world. It’s Plivo’s business to know the consent and opt-in requirements for each country and each carrier we work with so that we can serve our customers, but it’s your responsibility to know the guidelines that apply to your business so that you don’t accidentally violate them and get yourselves cut off from your campaigns and your customers.

We’ll let Sharita Passariello, Senior CRM Manager at Fluent and a guest in a recent Plivo webinar, have the last word: “It is extremely vital to me that we have expressed consent for these SMS messages. [so] the user knows exactly what they’re going to receive, what kind of updates they’re going to get, and who the updates are coming from. That’s so critical because it helps with overall long-term sustainability and performance. At the end of the day we’re using SMS to provide a service to our consumers. We’d like to help them.” In other words, consent isn’t just the law — it’s also good business practice.