Chat: First-Party Consent On A Third-Party Site

Lead generation has effectively remained unchanged for years, but that soon may be coming to an end.

Many businesses rely on inbound lead generators, also referred to as affiliate marketing sites (marketplaces), to generate prospective customers (leads) for their business. The contact information on these leads (Name, Phone, Email, Address) are shared with the business through an API post to their CRM or other approved methods of lead acceptance. Leads may also be delivered through live call transfers from the originating marketplace (call-center) to the business call center.

After accepting the lead, the business may have multiple prospect-outreach journeys in place, such as automated telephone or text-based direct marketing campaigns, email drip campaigns, direct mail and/or media ad retargeting.  Gathering leads from a leadgen provider helps aggregate prospects from different sources and also attain better conversion rates with lower marketing spend. The risk to the lead buyer is not having clarity into actual origination of the prospect. The actual lead (prospect) may have started off at multiple layers of branded websites before they came in as a lead into the business CRM. Contacting, connecting and reaching out to these leads becomes difficult to verify that proper consents are in place.

With numerous continued complaints from the shopper (prospect/lead) there is a daily deluge of class action lawsuits brought under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, 47 U.S.C. § 227 (”TCPA”) by industrious plaintiff’s lawyers, and it is only a matter of time before new rules and regulations are put in place emphasizing proper disclosure and consent collection for lead generation.  

Will it be possible to get 1st party consent on a 3rd party site? A form filled on a marketplace gives the marketplace the consent to contact the lead. While a disclosure may be put in place to accept consent on behalf of the lead buyer, it is NOT the buyer business’ website or asset that the prospect (lead) is exclusively signing up to connect with or receive inbound outreach from.

With Botsplash, businesses can host a chat form on any trusted domain that they do business with. The chat can be themed to the display colors and appearance that match the business’ brand and the brand of the marketplace. The options displayed on the chat menu can be specific to the product and service offering that is available via the marketplace partner. For example:

The benefits for lead buyers offer the consent and protections needed in today’s litigious environment. Some benefits of hosting a chat or embedded form for the marketplace include:

• provides first-party disclosure and gathers consent to collect consumer data
• text or call initiation will be treated as inbound engagement and automatically gathers consent
• allowing the business to upsell/cross-sell other product and service offerings to the prospect (lead) with first-party consent
• making the prospect aware of the business’ brand and the expectation is set that the business will reach out to them with questions
• re-marketing and re-engaging with the prospect is compliant since the prospect is now very aware as to whom they are doing business with

At Botsplash, we are constantly looking to improve how businesses engage with their customers and prospects. Our goals with the platform are to:

• Be where your customers are: we enable all digital channels including text, email, voice, and/or web chat during the journey to transaction, so you can assist your customers when they need you.
• Be there for your customers: most high-value transactions and purchases require more than one support or service agent. With our online platform and mobile app you can be sure your customers are always responded to either by an agent or with automated flows.

Businesses shouldn’t leave first-party consent in the hands of third-party lead generators and marketplaces should offer protection to their lead buyers. For more information on how to effectively add chat to your marketplace and affiliate sites, reach out to the Botsplash team at bizdev@botsplash.com.