Opt-Out Commands

Overview

Among the commands available to contacts to manage their conversation with your chatbot are those that allow them to opt-out of the service. These are extremely important and should be explained to contacts starting with the introductory message.

Mainstay is proud to comply with opt-out regulations and exceeds industry standards. This is achieved through the ability for contacts to use universal opt-out commands, as well as Mainstay’s proprietary command.

A contact's channel-specific messaging status is indicated in the contact panel.

#PAUSE

#PAUSE (case-insensitive) is Mainstay-designed command that allows contacts to stop messages from your bot temporarily. Because this command is controlled by Mainstay, you can choose to re-engage the contact at a later time if something in their status changes.

A contact might unsubscribe if they are receiving too many messages at this time, but want to . continue receiving them after a few weeks. By using #PAUSE, rather than with the texting provider's STOP, this also allows you to edit their status and message them again if necessary.

STOP

When your chatbot receives the word STOP without the # symbol (or a synonym like CANCEL, UNSUBSCRIBE, END, or QUIT), our texting provider Twilio will prevent your chatbot from further communicating with the recipient's phone number. The only way to reengage with this number again is if the recipient chooses to text in the word START (or a synonym like YES or UNSTOP).

Because this command is controlled by our text messaging provider, Mainstay does not control the content of the messages that are sent back to the recipient. 

Stop (without the # symbol), stopall, unsubscribe, cancel, end, and quit are universal commands (applicable to all text messaging services across the industry) that stop messages from being sent to the contact by a texting provider. The texting provider is the platform that transports the messages to the contact once they’ve been sent from our system. Messages from the system are stopped until the contact texts a code to re-engage, such as START.

#stop (with the # symbol) is a common alternative that some learners will use, so we also treat it like an opt-out keyword. However, this status is only stored on Mainstay, not at the Twilio or carrier level.