Usually yes. If someone typed a cell number into your website chat and asked you to get back to them, a text that answers that request is the ordinary case, not the risky one. The rules get tighter later, at the point where you stop answering them and start selling to them.
The text they asked for is the easy half
The wireless carriers publish their own rule book for business texting. It is the CTIA Messaging Principles and Best Practices, May 2023. Section 5.1 sorts business texts into three buckets, and the bucket sets how much permission you need.
- Conversational. The customer texts you first and you reply. If the consumer starts it and the business “simply responds, then no additional permission is expected.”
- Informational. This is your case. The document describes it as when “a Consumer gives their phone number to a Non-Consumer and asks to be contacted in the future.” Appointment reminders, welcome texts and alerts sit here. It expects express permission, given on a form, on a website, or out loud.
- Promotional. A sales or marketing message. Before one of those goes out, the consumer “should agree in writing.”
A stranger who types “no hot water, please call me” into your chat and leaves a number has asked to be contacted about that job. Texting back about that job is the middle bucket.
CTIA is the wireless industry’s trade group. It is not a court and not a regulator, and the document itself says its examples “do not constitute or convey legal advice.” What gives it weight is that its carrier members decide which business messages get delivered at all.
This is not legal advice either, and none of it was written by an attorney. Take it to your own attorney, and ask one extra question while you are there: whether your state has a texting law of its own sitting on top of the federal one.
Where it gets tighter is the promo three weeks later
The federal rule is 47 CFR 64.1200. Paragraph (f)(9) defines prior express written consent as “an agreement, in writing, bearing the signature of the person called that clearly authorizes the seller to deliver” advertising or telemarketing messages by autodialer or prerecorded voice, naming “the telephone number to which the signatory authorizes such advertisements or telemarketing messages to be delivered.” The same definition asks for a clear disclosure that the person is “not required to sign the agreement” as a condition of buying anything.
Read that as two separate permissions. “Text me about my water heater” is one. “Text me your spring specials” is another. A single form can collect both, if the form says both out loud and the second one is not a condition of getting a quote.
If your chat window is the thing doing the promising, the exact wording it uses is worth pinning down first, and that is a question of its own, answered in whether you are stuck with what your chatbot says.
The rule a court threw out, and what it did not change
In January 2025 the FCC lost a case about consent, and the headlines got read far too widely.
The case is Insurance Marketing Coalition Limited v. Federal Communications Commission, No. 24-10277, decided by the Eleventh Circuit on January 24, 2025. The court vacated Part III.D of the FCC’s 2023 order, the part that would have made a person consent to calls from “only one entity at a time,” and only to calls whose subject was “logically and topically associated with the interaction that prompted the consent.” The opinion holds that to give prior express consent “one need only ‘clearly and unmistakably’ state, before receiving the robocall, that he is willing to receive the robocall.”
Here is the limit on that win. The struck rule had never taken effect. Removing it changed nothing about the written consent definition above, which came out of a 2012 order the court described as “not at issue in this case.” Anyone telling you a court made marketing texts easier is selling you something.
When somebody says stop, you have ten business days
Paragraph (a)(10) of the same rule was added by FCC 24-24, adopted February 15, 2024 and released February 16, 2024. Compliance with it has been required since April 11, 2025.
A person may revoke consent “by using any reasonable method to clearly express a desire not to receive further calls or text messages.” Seven replies count on their own: stop, quit, end, revoke, opt out, cancel, unsubscribe. If they write something else, you still have to treat it as a revocation “if a reasonable person would understand those words to have conveyed a request to revoke consent.” So “quit texting me” counts even though it is not one of the seven.
Two numbers you can go check in the rule text yourself. A request “must be honored within a reasonable time not to exceed ten business days from receipt.” And you “may not designate an exclusive means” of opting out, so a texting tool that only listens for the word STOP is not enough by itself.
Paragraph (a)(12) lets you send one confirmation text back. Send it inside five minutes and it is presumed covered. It cannot carry any marketing.
One piece of this is still on hold. The part that treats a stop on one kind of message as a stop on everything you send was delayed by FCC order DA 25-312 on April 7, 2025 to April 11, 2026, then pushed again by DA 26-12 on January 6, 2026 to January 31, 2027. That date has now moved twice, so check it before you build anything around it. The simpler habit is to honor a stop everywhere the day it lands.
The reason any of this matters is 47 U.S.C. 227(b)(3). A person can recover “$500 in damages for each such violation,” and a court may raise that to “3 times” the amount for a willful or knowing one. Per text.
That is the statute talking, not a read on your own exposure. It is not legal advice, and your state may stack its own texting rules on top of the federal ones. Put the numbers above in front of your own attorney before you build anything on them.
What this will not do for you
Nobody at Galloping writes your consent language, your texting policy, or your privacy policy, and none of the monthly plans include one.
And if you already text people back yourself, from your own phone, inside the hour, about the job they asked about, you are already sitting in the safest bucket in the CTIA table. You do not need to buy a texting platform to keep doing that. The thing worth fixing is further upstream: whether the number and the job get captured cleanly at nine at night in the first place, which is what the AI assistant is for. A tool that blasts a saved list is a different animal with a different rule book.
What to do this week
- Open your own chat and form and read the line sitting above the phone field. If it does not say what you will text about, rewrite it until it does.
- Keep marketing permission on its own checkbox, left unchecked, and never as a condition of getting a quote.
- Save what each person saw and the date they agreed to it. If it is ever questioned, that record is the whole defense.
- Put a stop line in your first text, and make sure a plain “quit texting me” reaches a human, not just the word STOP.
- Walk the whole thing end to end before you switch it on. There is a fuller run through in testing your agent before launch.
- Take the finished wording to an attorney once. It is one bill, and it covers every text you send after it.