Declining to be recorded must not block the opt-in

The requirementstatement

A programme taking spoken consent must have a documented no-recording evidence path, and must never refuse a consumer the opt-in because they declined recording.

Severityseverity
HighHIGHRejected by at least one carrier or provider, and a common cause of failure at the rest.
When it bitesphase
Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
What is checkedobject
campaign.message_flow
Where it liveslayer
OperationalOPERATIONAL
How Ekas settles itdetectability
AI · formAI_FORM
A semantic question about what you wrote: whether a description matches a use case, whether a name looks like a filed entity. Judged by a model against written criteria.
What the fix involvesfailureClass
Fix the fieldRETRY_FIELD
A better value in the form fixes it. Ekas can rewrite it and re-check.
Who requires itauthorities
FTCpractice
When it appliesapplicabilityText
Applies when consent was collected by live verbal.

Why this rule existsrationale

Recording is not always available — the consumer says no, or the call crosses into an all-party-consent state — and a contact centre with no fallback does one of two harmful things: it drops the opt-in the consumer asked for, or it takes it with no evidence at all. Both are avoidable with an attestation that carries the agent, the timestamp and the script version, which is what reviewers accept in place of audio.

How to fix itremediation

Describe the fallback: a contemporaneous CRM attestation carrying the agent ID, the timestamp, the script version and the consumer's verbatim assent. Done when the flow says what happens when a consumer declines recording, and the answer is not "we cannot enrol them".

A compliant exampleexample

If the consumer declines recording, the agent stores the verbatim assent, agent ID, timestamp and script version in the CRM; the opt-in proceeds on that record.

Common mistakespitfalls

  • A fallback that only records "consent given: yes" is the same evidentiary gap the recording was there to close.

Rules you will hit next

6 other rules read campaign.message_flow. Fixing one field to satisfy a single rule is how a resubmission trades one rejection for another, so read these before you change anything.

All operational rules

OPS-239 is one of 139 operational rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.

Reading the rules is the easy part.

Ekas runs every rule that gates approval, 823 of these 915, against your registration before it reaches the carrier. It reads your site, your policy pages and your opt-in the way a reviewer would, and hands you the fix, not just the verdict.