How should we handle opt-outs and do-not-contact requests?

Opt-outs get trapped in the tool that received them

A customer replies STOP to a text. The messaging platform stops texting them. Your email tool never hears about it, your dialer never hears about it, and your direct mail list never hears about it.

From the customer’s side, they told you to stop and you did not. From your side, three systems each behaved correctly. This is the single most common way a business ends up looking like it ignored a request it actually honored — and it is a data architecture problem, not a discipline problem.

What a usable suppression record contains

• Who, resolved to a customer identity rather than just the phone number or email that received the request.
• Which channel, because a customer may want no marketing texts and still expect appointment reminders.
• What scope, marketing versus transactional versus everything. These are genuinely different requests and conflating them will get you complaints in both directions.
• When and where, the timestamp and the originating system, so you can demonstrate what you knew and when.
• Verbatim evidence where available — the reply text, the form submission, the call note.

Never delete, always suppress

The instinct after an opt-out request is to delete the record. Resist it unless the customer specifically asked for deletion. If you delete the record, nothing stops the same person from being re-imported next quarter from a purchased list or an old export, and then you contact them again.

A suppression list is a permanent memory of a decision. It is also what lets you honor the request against future imports. Deletion requests are a separate matter with their own handling, and the two should not be collapsed into one workflow. Where both need to coexist, the pattern is a minimal retained hash or identifier for suppression purposes — something to work through with counsel and your integration team together.

The legal layer, stated carefully

Rules governing calls, texts, email and recorded conversations vary by state, by channel, and by whether the contact is marketing or transactional. They also change. Consent obtained years ago may not cover what you want to send today, and the appropriate handling of a reassigned phone number is its own topic.

Nothing here is legal advice. What is safe to say generally is architectural: centralize suppression, apply the most restrictive standard across systems, retain evidence of consent and of requests, and make it easy for a customer to opt out through any channel they can reach you on. Then have a qualified attorney confirm the specifics for the states you operate in. Building the plumbing so that policy is enforceable in one place is the part an integrator can help with; the policy itself belongs to your counsel.