The separation between digital marketing and the contact centre is organisational and has no legal existence. The form that captures the contact, the text beside the checkbox and the record kept of that collection determine what the operation may lawfully do with that contact for years afterwards.
Four points of verification
The form
A clear affirmative act; a specific and intelligible purpose; separate consents for separate purposes; identification of the controller; and consent for marketing not made a condition of access to the service requested.
The record of collection
The moment, the exact version of the text displayed, the act performed and the technical provenance. This is what constitutes the proof, and it is what least often exists in complete form.
The handover to the operation
The contact must reach the operation carrying its provenance, the purpose consented to and its objection status, so that whoever makes contact knows what may and may not be said.
The return path for objections
An objection raised during a call must return to the source system and take effect across every channel. An objection recorded only in the telephony platform is the single most common cause of complaints about contact after refusal.
A test that takes two minutes
Pick a contact at random from the database and try to answer three questions: where did it come from, what text was displayed at the moment of collection, and what affirmative act was performed.
If the three answers are not available within seconds, the database is not safely usable — and the size of the database makes that finding more serious, not less.
Apply this to your operation
A general framework is no substitute for a concrete assessment. The diagnostic determines what applies to your operation.