TCPA Compliance

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) is a U.S. federal law that regulates automated calls and text messages. In practice, it means you generally need a recipient’s consent before sending them marketing or reminder texts, you must honor opt-out requests, and you may not text people during certain hours. Violations can carry significant per-message penalties.

Allison is built to make compliant messaging the default path. But compliance ultimately depends on you — on having permission to text the specific people on your list. Allison provides the tooling (consent capture, opt-out handling, quiet-hours enforcement); it cannot know whether a given contact actually gave you consent. Use Allison as a compliance aid, not as a substitute for your own responsibilities or legal advice.

When Allison texts your clients, those messages are sent on your behalf and represent your business. That makes you the sender of record and the party responsible for consent and for the content of the messages. Allison acts as your messaging tool.

Before you add clients to Allison, you should have their consent to receive text messages from your business. Good consent language is clear and specific. For example:

“By providing your phone number, you agree to receive appointment reminders and occasional messages from [Business Name]. Message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP to opt out, HELP for help.”

Keep a record of how and when each client consented. Allison retains opt-in and opt-out records to support your compliance.

The TCPA restricts messaging to reasonable hours. Allison never sends messages inside a recipient’s local quiet window — before 8:00 AM or after 9:00 PM in the recipient’s time zone. Messages that would land inside that window are held and delivered once the window reopens.

Every recipient can opt out at any time by replying STOP (or a standard opt-out word), and Allison stops messaging them immediately and permanently unless they text START to resubscribe. Replying HELP returns help information. This handling is automatic and cannot be disabled.

To respect your clients and reduce complaint risk, Allison caps outreach at roughly one message per recipient per day. Allison is designed for helpful, low-frequency reminders — not high-volume blasting.

U.S. carriers require application-to-person (A2P) 10DLC registration for business texting. Full live carrier registration is part of our roadmap and is not enabled while messaging is turned off in the current product configuration. When live messaging is enabled, brand and campaign registration will be handled as part of onboarding.

These external resources explain the rules in more detail:

• CTIA Messaging Principles & Best Practices (handbook)
• FCC — Telemarketing and Robocalls (TCPA)