One of your customers' texts drew complaints, and now it's your account

You run a platform that sends texts for hundreds of small businesses. One of them, a gym, drew complaints. Here is one way that week can go, and another.

An illustration, not legal advice. The messages are ours, not any provider’s, and nobody in them is real. What a provider can ask for and do is drawn from published policies and industry guidance, listed at the end.

Tuesday

Your messaging provider

We've had complaints about messages your platform sent for one of your customers. We need opt-in details for the subscribers listed below: when each agreed, how, and what they were shown. Your account covers all your customers' sending, so we'd like to resolve this quickly.

Tuesday

You, to the gym

Hi. Our provider is asking how these members signed up for texts. Do you have the sign-up forms or a list of when they joined?

Thursday

The gym

I think they signed up at the front desk? We switched membership software in the summer. I'll ask the old manager.

Friday

Your messaging provider

Checking in. Until we can confirm opt-in for these subscribers, we may need to limit sending on the account. That would affect your other customers too, which none of us wants.

Your team, meanwhileFour hundred businesses that did nothing wrong, waiting on a gym's old membership software. Your provider isn't the problem here. It's protecting every sender on its network from the ones who'll text anyone. It just can't tell which kind you are until you show it.

Have you been here?

Same Tuesday. This time each of your customers' signups was recorded as it happened, kept separately for each customer, with the exact words each member saw at the desk tablet or on the web form. You open the gym's records, export the listed subscribers' histories, and send them the same afternoon. The other four hundred businesses never notice.

Tuesday, 10:05

Your messaging provider

We've had complaints about messages your platform sent for one of your customers. We need opt-in details for the subscribers listed below.

Tuesday, 14:30

You

Here are the consent records for each listed subscriber, from that customer's own history: when they signed up, at the desk tablet or on the web form, the words they saw, and their YES.📎 gym-subscribers-consent-records.zip

What this can and can't do. It records what your platform reports, from the day you start, for each customer separately. It can't vouch for a form it never saw, can't rebuild a customer's history from before, and can't promise the provider will accept it.

Asked about people who signed up before you used Redoubt Vault? Send that history in as imported, with the name of the person who vouches for it. Your packet shows it for what it is: your records, given to us now, not something we saw happen. From then on, every new signup is recorded as it happens.

Keep each customer's opt-ins separately

Or read the API reference first. Pricing is on one page.

What this is based on

a provider's published messaging policy: a platform “must require those End Users and customers to obtain prior express written consent from any downstream users”.
a provider's acceptable use policy: “Customer is responsible for its End Users’ compliance with this AUP”.
a provider's guidance for software platforms: if one customer sends noncompliant traffic, the provider “may need to suspend the primary Account of that customer. This could include compliant customers in other subaccounts.”
a texting platform's terms of service: its customers are “solely responsible for maintaining accurate and complete records of such consent and compliance.”

One of your customers' texts drew complaints, and now it's your account

Have you been here?

What this is based on

Other stories