What gets checked before a touch
- Destination. The phone number, or email address for that channel, has to be valid and dialable.
- Consent attestation. The touch has to carry a recorded consent attestation, and the basis on file has to meet the policy’s minimum (for example, prior express written consent). No attestation, or a basis that doesn’t clear the bar, blocks the touch.
- Opt-out. A contact suppression on file, or a legacy opt-out or revocation flag on the lead, blocks every channel, not just the one the opt-out arrived on.
- Do-Not-Call. A lead whose lifecycle status is DNC is blocked outright.
- Lead-status suppression. A policy can name other lead statuses, such as “retained,” that should stop outbound contact even without a formal opt-out.
- Quiet hours and frequency caps. Covered below.
What an opt-out does
An opt-out stops future touches immediately, on every channel. It is a revocation of contact consent, not a preference for one channel over another. A caller texting back a keyword like STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, or CANCEL is handled synchronously and unconditionally: the platform records the suppression, flips the lead’s opt-out flag, and terminates every active outbound cadence for that contact in the same request that processed the reply. This path is not a feature that can be turned off. It runs on every inbound SMS or WhatsApp reply, regardless of campaign configuration. Your team can also push in suppression lists from an external source, such as a DNC list your firm maintains elsewhere; Compensable applies the same effect and ends any active cadence for that contact. Every opt-out generates a notification to your team (“SMS opt-out (STOP) received”) and is recorded in the audit trail, so a suppression is never silent.Quiet hours
Outbound calls, texts, and voicemail drops are checked against the lead’s local time, resolved from the lead’s phone number or an explicit timezone you supply, using whichever window is stricter: the federal 8am-9pm calling window, or the lead’s state statute where one is stricter (several states, including Florida, Rhode Island, and Texas, have their own hours or Sunday restrictions on file). Email is exempt from quiet hours. If the platform can’t resolve a lead’s local time at all, the touch is denied rather than guessed at. An unresolvable timezone fails closed. A quiet-hours or frequency-cap denial is retryable: the touch is queued for the next permissible window rather than dropped.Frequency caps
A rolling window, 24 hours by default, caps how many times a lead can be touched: a per-channel cap and a separate cross-channel cap across all channels combined. A published campaign policy can set its own, tighter caps on top of the platform default.An admin can loosen quiet hours and frequency caps, nothing else
An admin can accept, on the record, that a specific campaign’s timing or frequency checks should be relaxed. That action requires an explicit liability acceptance and a stated legal basis, and it’s logged as its own event with a counsel attestation attached. It affects only the quiet-hours and frequency-cap checks. Consent, opt-out, DNC, and destination checks are not reachable by this override under any configuration.How blocked touches are surfaced to your team
- Every touch decision, allowed, denied, or skipped, lands in the cadence ledger, filterable by phone number, policy, or decision, alongside a chain-verification check for that record.
- Active suppressions are listed separately, so you can see who’s currently blocked and why.
- STOP-keyword opt-outs generate an in-app notification the moment they’re processed.
- Every decision, including a denial’s specific reason and retry time, is written to the audit trail.
Compensable enforces the consent and calling-hours policies your firm configures. It does not itself determine what consent your campaigns require under the TCPA or state law. That determination, and documenting it, remains your firm’s responsibility.