Webinar: New TCPA Regulations Coming April 11, 2025
We’ve been writing about the FCC’s new consent revocation TCPA regulations for months. Now, we have a firm date that key rules will take effect.
Starting April 11, 2025, these new calling and texting regulations will take effect:
- Text senders will have to recognize more ways to opt out ("STOP to end" prompts won’t be enough on their own).
- When recipients opt out of any marketing outreach, you’ll need to stop all marketing outreach. When consumers opt out of non-marketing administrative texts, you need to stop all administrative AND marketing outreach across the board.
- Opt-outs must be processed in 10 days or fewer.
Big changes call for solutions from big thinkers. That’s why Drips was thrilled to take part in this webinar from Troutman Amin, LLP. Drips Co-Founder and CEO A.C. Evans joined TCPA experts Eric Troutman, Puja Amin, and John Henson to discuss the impact of the new rules.
Watch the full webinar above or on YouTube and read on for key insights from the conversation.
Four Key TCPA Consent Revocation Challenges
Eric Troutman started the conversation by identifying four key challenges presented by the FCC’s new rules.
- Identifying users' intent signals. Is their intention to revoke consent? "In some instances, they're going to use "STOP." That's pretty clear,” Eric Troutman explained. “In other instances they're going to use other phrases that you're going to have to interpret…”
- Processing identified revocations from across different channels (text, phone, email, and more).
- Effectively distributing preference data to all groups in your enterprise that contact your audience.
- Finding ways to "claw back" consent when the consumer clearly meant to opt out of just one type of message, not all messages.
How Can Companies Track Millions of Non-Standard Opt-Outs?
Under the new TCPA rules, consumers can opt out of their prior express consent in “any reasonable manner.” That means text senders need to go beyond looking for keywords like STOP, END, and UNSUBSCRIBE. In fact, Drips has discovered over 5 million ways that real consumers opt out.
Is it really possible to recognize all these? A.C. shared his insights, saying:
“I’ve seen all the ways you can deal with this. One is, you can staff out so you have literal people reading [messages] and doing dispositions ... That costs a lot of money and you’ve got risk there if people do it wrong.”
He continued, “You can leverage LLMs [large language models] … the problem with the LLMs is you have to have enough training data for it to be accurate.” That’s why Drips offers our Disqualified by Drips model so that enterprises don’t need to DIY a solution.
Finally, A.C. predicted that many companies will overcorrect by either halting all text outreach or unnecessarily opting out much of their contact lists due to an inability to recognize opt-outs accurately.
The TCPA Opt-Out “Waterfall”
The Troutman team underlined a key facet of the new TCPA rules related to message purpose. Depending on the purpose of the message a consumer opts out of, the effect could impact just that one message type or it could stop all messaging.
This can be visualized as a “waterfall” where a marketing revocation is the lowest tier, and informational messages and exempt messages are “upstream.”
“A stop to an informational message is going to revoke the ability to message or call across all channels, marketing or informational,” said Puja Amin
So, an opt-out for marketing messaging stops marketing only. In the worst-case scenario, an opt-out from an exempt message like an emergency alert could flow down and stop all informational and marketing messages as well.
Stop Opt-Outs Before They Start
The new FCC rules offer a method to confirm and clarify the scope of a TCPA opt-out. However, it’s likely that successfully retaining partial consent after an opt-out will be difficult.
“As soon as somebody opts out, they’re one foot out the door and your chance of losing them is pretty high,” A.C. said.
Instead, he suggests the key is to stop opt-outs before they start.
That means enterprises should audit all the different phone and text message outreach they are doing, rank their priority, and make hard decisions to reduce the number of messages they send. Fewer messages sent will reduce the chances that consumers will opt out.
In addition, it’s a good idea to recognize when a conversation has reached a natural end and proactively close it out before a consumer feels the need to revoke consent. This could be handled by human agents or solutions like Drips’ Conversational Close-Outs.
More TCPA Insights and Solutions
Troutman Amin and Drips both have much more to say to help guide your TCPA compliance. Troutman’s TCPAWorld blog is a great source for TCPA news and Drips’ compliance resource library has practical insights and TCPA solutions.
