Consent, DND and calling hours: the checks before you dial at volume

An autodialer will happily break rules nobody on the team has read. The failure is rarely a deliberate decision — it is a campaign someone set up on a Friday, with defaults nobody questioned, against a list whose origin nobody can now explain.

Four things to have straight before the first campaign goes out.

1. Where did this list come from?

For every list you dial, someone should be able to answer, in one sentence, how these people came to be on it. "Enquiry form on the site, March" is an answer. "It was in a spreadsheet on the shared drive" is not, and it is the origin of most of the trouble.

Purchased lists are the highest-risk category almost everywhere. If you cannot describe the relationship that justifies the call, the safest assumption is that you do not have one.

2. Do-not-call registers

Most markets run one, and in several it is legally binding on commercial callers with real penalties. India, the UK, the US, Australia and the EU each have their own mechanism and their own scope — some cover only marketing, some carve out existing customers, some do not.

Two practical points that hold nearly everywhere:

• Screening is your obligation, not your platform's. Software can record that a number is on your suppression list; it cannot know a national register on your behalf.
• An opt-out has to survive the campaign. If "do not call" only removes someone from the list they were on, they will be dialled again by the next one. It has to be a property of the contact.

Convarza treats do-not-call as a lead stage on the contact, which takes them out of every calling list rather than one — but keeping your register current is still your job.

3. Calling hours

Permitted windows are set by the recipient's location, not yours. A campaign run from Noida into the UK is bound by UK expectations, and a campaign that follows the sun without anyone deciding it should is the classic way to find this out.

Three habits:

• Set hours on the line, so a new campaign inherits them and cannot dial outside them by omission. A per-campaign setting is one forgotten checkbox away from a 6am call.
• Set the timezone explicitly. Inherited server time is not a decision.
• Add date exceptions for public holidays in the markets you call. Technically permitted and deeply unwelcome are different things.

4. Disclosure, when the caller is an AI

A growing number of jurisdictions require you to say that the caller is automated, and several regulate synthetic voice separately. The regulatory picture is moving quickly enough that "we checked last year" is not a position.

Our advice is simpler than the law: disclose in the opening line regardless. It costs one sentence, it removes the question entirely, and callers behave better when they know — they ask plainer questions and take handovers far more gracefully. Never use a synthetic voice to imitate a specific real person, which is a bright line nearly everywhere.

5. Recording

Consent rules for recording vary sharply — some places need one party's consent, some need everyone's, some require an announcement. If you record, say so at the start of the call. If you operate across borders, the strictest rule you touch is the practical standard.

Also decide how long you keep recordings, and write it down. "Forever, because storage is cheap" is a data-protection problem you have chosen without noticing.

The pre-flight, in one place

1. Can we say in one sentence where this list came from?
2. Has it been screened against the registers that apply where we are calling?
3. Do opt-outs sit on the contact, not the campaign?
4. Are calling hours set on the line, with an explicit timezone and holiday exceptions?
5. Does the opening line disclose that it is an AI agent?
6. If we record, do we say so, and do we know how long we keep it?

Six questions, one meeting, before the first dial rather than after the first complaint. How campaigns inherit hours from the channel.