Text Messaging Featured Article

The new Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) regulations, which went into effect last October, have tightened the reins on how companies can reach out to customers using SMS. In some ways, the new regulations have been a big help, particularly to consumers who had previously received a lot of unwanted spam text messages and had no concrete way to stop them. But while the new regulations protect consumers, they’ve also placed a new and sizable burden on companies that use SMS as part of their marketing or business strategies.

Under the new TCPA guidelines, companies are prohibited from texting consumers without prior written consent, or proof that the recipient opted in. Lots of companies use text messaging—not just for marketing, but for all kinds of customer service outreach. But even if a company sends a text message that isn’t spam, it doesn’t matter in the eyes of the law, because without prior consent it’s now an illegal practice no matter what. This is highly problematic, considering a company could be fined between $500 and $1,000 per violation if it does not have proof of consumer opt-ins.

David Vaughan, project director and CRO at TSG Global, Inc., has seen the business impacts of the new TCPA regulations first-hand.

“One of our major clients had been working for nearly a year…consulting with legal consul familiar with the new rulings, to get correct verbiage on websites and begin implementing an opt-in process for the existing database where previous permission had not been obtained,” Vaughan told TMC (News - Alert). “This area of focus was costing an enormous amount of money.”

One solution to the problem of written consent, which TSG Global has always promoted, is to make sure that companies require their clients to initiate first contact via text, in order to confirm that the number the company is attempting to text is in fact a text-enabled number.

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“The benefit of using text-enabled numbers, as opposed to using short codes for SMS and inbound marketing, is that there is no additional cost based on whether an SMS message is inbound or outbound,” Vaughan explained. “The other added benefit of having the end-users initiate the okay, by sending a text in first, is that the inbound text counts as written permission or written proof.”

TSG Global also suggests, as an alternative, that companies can confirm consent for communication via SMS messaging using a simple “call to action” at the end of a message, asking the intended end-user for continued permission by replying “yes” or “no.”

Vaughan gave the example here of a company—not a client of TSG Global—that had taken the “call to action” advice after the new TCPA regulations went into effect. “This colleague witnessed an 80 percent ratio of involvement from end-users who received the call to action to reply versus not sending a call to action at all,” he said.

The new TCPA regulations have added an extra step to the process of using text messaging in business, but it has by no means made it impossible. If companies follow TSG Global’s simple solutions, they may be able to avoid the pain and expense of accidental text message violations.