Acceptable Use and Calling Policy

1. 1.1It applies to every call and text message Otengo places for you, whether it comes from a flow, a campaign, or a follow-up to a call you received.
2. 1.2You are the data controller for the people you contact. You decide who is called and why. We are your processor: we place the calls on your instruction, and we do not contact your customers for our own purposes.
3. 1.3Because of that split, the permission to contact someone has to be yours. This policy is largely about how you establish it and how we help you keep the evidence.
4. 1.4Nothing here is legal advice. Your obligations depend on where your customers are, and you should take your own advice about them.

The single question that decides whether a call is lawful is why you are making it. Otengo makes you choose, per flow and per campaign, and the choice changes what the system will let you do.

What applies is decided by where the person you are calling is, not by where your store is. A summary is below; there is more detail on our calling rules page.

Some rules are ours to keep, not yours to choose, either because they are separate legal duties owed to the person being called, or because breaking them damages the phone-number reputation that every merchant on Otengo shares. They apply whatever a flow says and whatever you have confirmed.

1. 4.1Anyone who opts out is never called again. Suppression outranks every flow setting and every attestation, including a merchant confirmation that permission exists. It applies across voice and SMS together.
2. 4.2The AI disclosure stays in the greeting. You can word it how you like. You cannot remove it. Callers are always told they are speaking with an AI assistant.
3. 4.3Recording requires a recording notice. Recording is off until your greeting says calls are recorded. Remove that from the greeting and recording switches itself off.
4. 4.4Quiet hours and legally required screening. Calling hours are enforced in the recipient's own timezone, and statutory do-not-call screening runs regardless of your settings. You can make these stricter; you cannot exceed them.

The first of these deserves emphasis, because it is the one merchants ask us to make an exception to. If someone tells us to stop - on a call, by text, or through the preference centre - they are never called or texted again for your store. That holds even if they later appear in a list you upload, even if they are still marked as consenting in Shopify, and even if you confirm you have permission. There is no setting that turns it off and no support request that will.

1. 5.1Which customers a flow calls, and which to exclude.
2. 5.2What the assistant says, what it may offer, and the maximum discount it can give.
3. 5.3When calls may be placed, within the legal limits - you can be stricter than the law, never more permissive.
4. 5.4How often a customer may be contacted, and how many attempts a flow makes.
5. 5.5Whether calls are recorded, and for how long recordings are kept.
6. 5.6Your spending limit, so a misconfigured campaign cannot run up a bill.

You can upload your own contacts. When you do, you accept this confirmation, and we store it with your name, the time, and a fingerprint of the file:

We also run checks on uploads, and they are not about your liability - they are about protecting every other merchant. A single purchased list can get our phone numbers flagged as spam, and the customers whose calls stop being answered belong to somebody else. We look for blocks of consecutive numbers, uploads far larger than your customer base, lists with almost no overlap with your own customers, and unusual rates of immediate hang-ups or complaints. Any of these can pause calling on your account while we ask you about it.

Uploading contacts is available on paid plans only.

You may not use Otengo to:

1. 7.1Call people who have not given your store permission, where permission is required - including purchased, rented, scraped or swapped lists, however they are described by whoever sold them.
2. 7.2Call anyone who has opted out, or try to route around suppression by uploading them again, using a different number, or splitting them across stores.
3. 7.3Disguise who is calling: false or unreachable caller identity, a store name that is not yours, or an assistant that claims to be a specific named person.
4. 7.4Present the assistant as human, or remove the disclosure that it is not.
5. 7.5Record a call in a place where recording needs consent you have not obtained, or where recording without consent is a criminal offence.
6. 7.6Collect payment card details, passwords, government identifiers or health information on a call. Otengo is not built for it, and the assistant is instructed to refuse - move the customer to a secure link instead.
7. 7.7Call about anything unlawful, or anything regulated in a way that requires a licensed human: credit and debt collection, insurance or investment advice, prescription medicines, gambling, and similar.
8. 7.8Harass, threaten, deceive, or call repeatedly after a clear refusal.
9. 7.9Call emergency numbers, or dial ranges of numbers to see which connect.
10. 7.10Resell Otengo calling to somebody else’s customers, or use one store’s account to call another store’s list.

1. 8.1Every marketing message identifies your store and carries a way to stop, and STOP and HELP are honoured automatically. You cannot remove them.
2. 8.2A stop applies to calls as well as texts. The two are one suppression list, not two.
3. 8.3Sending business messages to US numbers requires registration with the mobile carriers, which takes around two weeks and needs a working website matching your store name. We handle the registration; we cannot shorten the review.
4. 8.4Messages must relate to the reason the person gave you their number.

1. 9.1Every call presents a working number that reaches you, and every call has a person or a voicemail behind it if the assistant cannot help.
2. 9.2We do not dial more people than we can answer, which is what produces silent calls. In the UK, persistent silent or abandoned calls are treated as misuse of the network and carry penalties of up to £2m in their own right.
3. 9.3Where a call is abandoned, an informative message is played rather than silence, and the number is not re-dialled within 72 hours unless a person is guaranteed to be available.
4. 9.4Calling hours are applied in the time zone of the person being called, not yours. A campaign that looks like it runs at 10am runs at 10am for them.

1. 10.1Recording is off when you start. You switch it on.
2. 10.2You can only switch it on once your greeting tells callers that the call is recorded. If you later remove that from the greeting, recording switches itself off and we tell you. Recording silently is not something the product can do.
3. 10.3Several US states require every party to agree to being recorded, and the notice in the greeting is what makes that work. Do not remove it and keep recording by other means.
4. 10.4Germany is different: recording someone’s speech without permission is a criminal offence there, not a compliance failure. Keep recording off for German customers.
5. 10.5You choose how long recordings are kept, up to a year. There is no option to keep them forever.

1. 11.1We may pause calling on your account immediately and without notice where we believe people are being called without permission, where complaint or hang-up rates suggest it, or where our numbers are being flagged. Inbound answering usually keeps working while we sort it out.
2. 11.2We will tell you what we saw and what would resolve it. Most pauses come from a misconfigured audience and are fixed the same day.
3. 11.3Repeated or deliberate breaches end the agreement, and we will say so plainly rather than quietly degrading your service.
4. 11.4If a regulator contacts us about calls made for your store, we will tell you unless we are legally prevented from doing so, and we will give them the consent records we hold. Those records are the same ones you can export at any time.
5. 11.5Where a breach causes us loss - fines, carrier penalties, the cost of replacing flagged numbers - the indemnity in the Terms of Service applies.

1. 12.1Calling law moves, and this policy will move with it. Material changes are notified in the app before they take effect.
2. 12.2Where a change is forced by law, it takes effect on the date the law does, which is not always as much notice as we would like to give.
3. 12.3Questions about whether something is permitted are welcome at info@otengo.com, and asking first is always cheaper than asking afterwards.