Opt-outs and consent

How STOP, START, and HELP work, marketing vs. transactional texts, and where to see your opt-out list.

Texting customers comes with legal obligations around consent and opt-outs, separate from carrier registration. This article covers how Hey Quad handles them and what you're responsible for.

STOP, START, and HELP

These three keywords are handled automatically on every registered number — you don't need to build anything for them to work.

• STOP (and the variants STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT) — opts the sender out. They immediately receive an automatic confirmation, and no further texts can be sent to that number until they opt back in.
• START (and UNSTOP, YES) — opts the sender back in, removing them from the opt-out list.
• HELP — sends an automatic reply with help information.

Opt-outs persist until the customer texts START. There's nothing an agent needs to do, and nothing that overrides it from the console — if a number is opted out, every send to it is blocked until the customer opts back in themselves.

Where to see who's opted out

Go to Settings → Consent & DNC to see every number that has opted out, either by texting STOP or by manual suppression. This is your organization's authoritative do-not-contact list for texting.

Marketing vs. transactional texts

Not all texts carry the same consent requirement:

• Transactional texts — appointment reminders, confirmations, order updates, callback texts — need only the ordinary consent a customer gives by doing business with you (for example, booking an appointment and providing their number).
• Marketing texts — promotions, offers, win-back campaigns — need a higher bar: clear, written consent that the customer specifically agreed to receive promotional messages, not just to be contacted at all.

If you're building a call flow that collects this consent, use the Capture consent node and set its scope to marketing for promotional opt-ins and transactional for everything else. See the Capture consent node reference under Call flows for details.

"Reply STOP to opt out" must appear in your opt-in confirmation message and in your marketing texts. This isn't just good practice — it's what you declared to carriers in your campaign registration, and carriers actively check for it.

Quiet hours

Federal and Florida law restrict when marketing texts can be sent to a recipient's local time — Florida's rule is the tighter of the two, running from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. recipient local time for marketing messages. Transactional texts (appointment reminders, confirmations) aren't subject to the same marketing quiet-hours restriction, but sending any text outside reasonable hours is worth avoiding regardless of category. Build sending schedules for any marketing or campaign-style texting with this window in mind.

Common gotchas

• A STOP from any keyword variant opts the whole number out, not just from the specific conversation it was sent from — STOPALL, CANCEL, END, and QUIT all work the same as STOP.
• A later STOP always wins, even if consent was recorded more recently through a call flow's Capture consent node. Opt-out status takes priority over any consent record.
• Opt-outs are per phone number pair, not per contact record — if a contact has multiple phone numbers on file, an opt-out on one doesn't opt out the others.