A text that arrives within a minute of a missed call is one of the simplest, highest-payoff things a service business can set up. It’s also regulated, and the rules are easy to get wrong if you bolt texting onto a website form without thinking. Here’s how we approach it. This is a practical summary, not legal advice; for anything unusual, check with your attorney.
Consent: get it, word it clearly, keep a record
US texting is governed mainly by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) plus carrier rules. The practical upshot:
- Replying to someone who contacted you (they called, they texted, they filled out a form asking you to get back to them) is the strongest position. The text is about their request.
- On web forms, we add a clear, unchecked consent line next to the phone field: who will text, what about, that message and data rates may apply, and how to stop. We store the exact wording, the time and the page it was given on.
- Marketing texts (promotions, re-engaging old leads) need stronger, explicit written consent. We treat old-lead follow-up as its own project with its own consent check, never as a side effect.
Registration: A2P 10DLC
If you text customers from a normal local number through a software provider, US carriers require the business and the use case to be registered (called A2P 10DLC). Unregistered traffic gets filtered or blocked. Registration takes days to a few weeks and needs accurate business details and sample messages, so we start it on day one of a project, not the week before launch.
Opting out: STOP means stop, immediately
Every system we build handles STOP (and the usual variants) automatically: one confirmation, then nothing else to that number, across every channel the system controls. The conversation is marked opted-out in the owner’s inbox, so nobody on the team accidentally texts them by hand either.
Hours and frequency
Federal telemarketing rules limit calls and texts to roughly 8 am to 9 pm in the recipient’s local time, and some states are stricter. A reply to someone who just contacted you is different from a cold message, but we still default to sensible hours for anything that isn’t a direct reply, and we cap follow-ups.
Saying it’s automated
Our assistants say they’re a virtual assistant on the first message. It’s the honest thing to do, some states are moving toward requiring it, and in our experience customers don’t mind.
Calls, too
If an AI answers or records phone calls, callers hear a short notice at the start (“this call may be recorded”). Some states require every party’s consent to record, so we treat the notice as standard everywhere.
None of this slows a project down if it’s planned from the start. It’s just part of building a system you can leave running.