Consent cannot be exchanged, bought, or sold. For instance, you cannot obtain the consent of the recipients by simply buying a phone list from other parties. 

Service providers or carriers strive to work closely with their customers to obtain their consent before sending any type of message. Along with the consent taken from the recipients of the messages, you need to take care that the messages comply with all measures of decency, fairness, and the local laws. 

Carriers or the telecommunication service providers, need to make sure that businesses willing to contact their customers via any communication channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook, etc. adhere to all the strict guidelines that are governed by the local laws. 

Once you take consent from your recipients you need to prepare a consent record database. You would require to create a consent record database for contacts in the following scenarios:

• When an explicit consent is obtained via the website, email, or mobile handset captured at the object record level
• When explicit consent is obtained via contract or paper forms

As per regulatory guidelines, all consents, collected through non-handset sources or created manually need to be maintained and recorded in a database.

Consent can be created in the following ways:

• Create Consent through Process Builders
• Create Consent Manually

1. Overview

You would need to create a consent record for contacts for the following scenarios:

• When explicit consent obtained via the website, email, or mobile handset captured at the object record level.
• When explicit consent obtained via contract or paper forms.

Consent Obtained via Website, Email, or Mobile Handset

We recommend that you use a process builder and create the consent record automatically when the record is created or edited. Write a process builder as given in the following section on record creation and create a consent record.

Please note, when records are created via non-mobile handset such as web forms, one needs to get the opt-in via a mobile handset. This process of confirming consent via mobile handset by contact created by web forms is called Double Opt-in.

To initiate double opt-in, the admin needs to use the Confirmation Config field and add Compliance Status to Pending to initiate a double opt-in process. One can find Confirmation Config under Converse Settings > Multichannel Compliance > Double Opt-In & Other > View Details.

Consent Obtained via Contract or Paper Forms

If you need to capture the consent on a continuous basis and whenever the records are created or edited, we recommend the same process of configuring the process builder. You must use the comment fields when creating a consent record so that during the audit process you can confirm the source of the consent.

2. Configuring Process Builder

1. Under Setup, click on the ‘Process Builder’ and then click on the ‘New’ button. The New Process pop-up window appears

2. Enter the following information:

• The Process Name
• The API name
• A Description of the process
• The Action trigger indicates when the process will begin

3. Click on the ‘Save’ button

4. In the Process Builder page, click on the ‘Add Object’ button

5. Under Object, type the object that will be modified, for example, Contact or Lead

6. Click on the ‘Save’ button

7. Click on the ‘Add Criteria’ button

8. You can define the criteria as per your need, whenever a new lead is created OR Whenever record-level field capturing consent is getting updated. Here we have set up criteria as Whenever record-level field capturing consent is getting updated.

9. Click on the ‘Add Action’ button. Select Apex class – smagicinteract__ConsentService  

10. Enter the details, as required. Refer to the table below for more details.

11. Click on the ‘Add Row’ button to include additional fields as given below:

3. Consent Details

Consents Record Details

SMS-History – Confirmation Messages sent

1. Click. The app launcher appears.

2. Under ‘All Items’, click on the ‘Consents’ link. The Consent List view page appears:

3. Click on the ‘New’ button. The Add New Consent Record pop-up window appears.

4. Refer to the table below for more details on individual fields.

5. Click on the ‘Save’ button. The Consent Record List will be added to the consent database and appears as shown:

6. Click on the individual record and the record details can be seen as below:

7. You can check the consent confirmation message sent in SMS-History as per your double opt-in configuration set.

1. Edit Consent Records

1. Select the checkbox adjacent to the consent record you want to edit.
2. Click and then click on the ‘edit’ button. The Edit Consent Record for <phone number> pop-up window appears:

3. Edit the details as required. Refer to the table below for more details on individual fields.
4. Click on the ‘Save’ button. Consent Record is updated in the list view.

2. View Audit History

1. Click on theicon. The app launcher appears:

2. Under ‘All items’, click on the ‘Consents’ link. The Consent record page appears:

3. Click on the icon and select ‘All’ to remove filters and view all records. The All records view appears:

4. Click a consent record to view details. The Consent details page appears:

5. Click a consent status on the right to view the audit history details.

3. Change Consent Owner

1. Click on theicon. The app launcher appears:

2. Under ‘All items’, click on the ‘Consents’ link. The Consent record page appears:

3. Click and select ‘All’ to remove filters and view all records. The All records view appears:

4. Click on the icon and then select ‘Change Owner’ from the drop-down list that appears. The Change Owner pop-up window appears.

5. Type the first three letters to search for the user to whom you want to assign the consent record. The search results appear as a drop-down list:

6. Select the user

7. Clear the ‘Send Notification Email’ checkbox if you do not want to notify the selected user of being assigned as the consent record owner.

8. Click on the ‘Submit’ button

Prior to the 1.59 release, we used to store consent information such as Opted-In or Opted-Out on the object record detail page. The disadvantage of this way of storing consent information is when the same number exists for two lead records and one record has opted-in and another record has opted-out information, the system will block one message but will still send the message to another record.

To overcome the above problem, we maintain consent information in the Consent object and not at the object record level. These consent records are referred to when a user attempts to send messages via bulk, automated, or manually. 

So, if you are upgrading from a lower version to a higher version falling under below mentioned scenarios, you will have to create/import your existing consent records using batch processing or data loader.

• Customers who were on the version below v1.59 and are upgrading to v1.59/v1.60 to maintain consent information in the consent object.
• Customers who were on the version below v1.59 and are upgrading to v1.64 to maintain consent information in the consent object.
• Customers who were already on v1.59 /v1.60 with WhatsApp and Facebook consent information captured in the consent object and are now upgrading to v1.64 / above to maintain channel specific consent information in the consent object.

Please refer to the following list of fields, field API names, and their purpose in order to put correct values in CSV file to import consents successfully.