Getting Your Customers Registered for SMS/MMS Messaging for nCommand Plus

What to do to get registered

Why The Change to Registration for Messaging

With changes to the current messaging landscape, mobile carriers are now requiring any business users that send SMS/MMS messages over 10 digit numbers (A2P 10DLC) to have those numbers registered with an organization called The Campaign Registry (TCR). https://www.campaignregistry.com/.

The intent is to cut down on text message spam that has become a growing problem for their mobile customers. Registering with TCR allows TCR to review your customers Brand and their Use-Case for what they intend to use messaging for, link the Brand (the business entity sending the messages) and the Campaigns (each specific use-case) with the CSP (Campaign Service Providers - you), along with the list of telephone numbers the messages will be sent from, all with the purpose of providing complete traceability back to the originator of any message. If your customers messages are determined to be non-compliant, the mobile carriers will happily send us a fine, which we will then pass on to you. Repeated non-compliance will result in the mobile carriers blocking your customer's number completely from messaging.

In order to prevent the risk of financial penalties, we have taken the step of disabling all SMS/MMS messaging for use with nCommand Plus.

If your customers do want to keep sending messages external to their organization, these messages will be sent using SMS/MMS and require a registration with TCR. However, until the whole registration process is complete, we cannot enable you to send SMS/MMS messages.

Using nCommand Plus For Internal Messaging

As part of the recent change, we also enabled a feature in nCommand Plus where your customers can still send messages to other internal users within their own organization such that those messages do not traverse the SMS/MMS messaging gateways. To enable this feature, have your customers log out of their client and log back in. The messaging tab will be there, and they can send and receive normally within their organization.

 

Steps to Get Registered

There is a relationship hierarchy that is required in order to provide full traceability of messages through the entire messaging chain, and as a partner, you play a part in this chain. We have a very comprehensive set of resources available here:

Understanding A2P 10DLC 

This article will attempt to distill this down to what is important for you to know and how to get started.

Becoming a Campaign Service Provider

Since you own the customer relationship and are selling the services to your customers, you are their CSP (Campaign Service Provider). This means you must register with TCR so that you can enter your customer's brand and campaign registrations.

To begin, start here:

https://www.campaignregistry.com/

Click the Register Now button to begin.

TCR has a number of helpful documents in their FAQ section. The guide linked below provides a walkthrough of completing the registration process and then how to enter brands and campaigns for your customers.

TCR Portal Guide

 

The first step you will need to do is complete your registration as a CSP. This can take several days for approval. Note that TCR does charge a fee to become a CSP. Slide 8 of the Portal Guide contains expected fees.

Once your CSP registration is successful, you can create additional user accounts for your company to manage any brand and campaign registrations for your customers.

 

Brands and Campaigns

The next step is to begin filing brands and campaigns for your customers that wish to send SMS/MMS messages from the nCommand Plus client.

You will be asking a lot of information about your customer's company, the intended uses for messaging and the list of phone numbers they'll be sending messages from. All of this information is REQUIRED by TCR to evaluate the request. They are trained to know what will pass the mobile carriers scrutiny in terms of your customer's registration request.

Cheat Sheet Form

To start, we have a handy form here:

A2P 10DLC Messaging Campaign Form

This form contains all the information that you need to collect from your customer in order to complete the brand and campaign registration in the TCR portal. You could use this form to hand to your customers to fill out, or use this as a checklist to help gather information needed to file for them. Once you have all the necessary information, you can begin to fill out the brand and campaign information in the TCR portal. Review the TCR Portal Guide as it has step-by-step instructions on what to fill out.

Vetting a customer is extremely important so the more information you have on the customer, the better. Only enter brands and campaigns for customers you trust will not abuse the service. There are steep penalties associated with content violations.

Brand Information

The first page in the cheat sheet form is the Brand information. This is information about the company you are creating a brand for, and should be pretty clear about what to fill out. Some of these are drop-down options in TCR, so try creating a brand in the TCR portal to view what options are available as these may change over time. A Brand can have multiple Campaigns if you have different use-cases that you use messaging for.

Campaign Information

The second page is the Campaign the customer wants to be filed. Note that "Campaign" is used loosely here in that it's normally associated with a text message blast, but in the context of filing for messaging use-cases, it really means what is going to be the content of the messages.

For nCommand Plus usage, the campaign choice really depends on how your customer is using the client to communicate with customers and most importantly, the content of those messages.

If you have a lot of time, here is a very detailed article on what is A2P 10 DLC messaging and all the related information, most of which you don't really need to know to complete the form.

Everything You Wanted to Know About A2P 10DLC But Were Afraid To Ask

It's a lot as the mobile carriers have made this very complex.

 

However, since you don't really need to know all this, we'll list some parts of that info that will help in deciding how to fill out the campaign info.

We have a doc with a list of Best Practices for a successful messaging campaign. Note that this doc has a lot of detailed information, so the sections that might be relevant for your customers are Section 6 and Section 8. There is some useful notes in here about how to not run afoul of the mobile carriers rules around content, which is where much of the focus is.

Messaging Best Practices

 

For nCommand Plus, the more common use-case will likely be "Low-volume mixed". When choosing this, select the types of content you might be sending, like "Customer Care" or perhaps "Marketing". Many of the other types are more common for automated systems (2FA, Account Notifications, etc) vs how you would send messages in nCommand Plus where you must type in your message one-by-one to each destination, though you can obviously choose to send the message to more than one number. Again, keep in mind the expected content of your customer's messages will help determine the use case category to choose.

For "Campaign Content and Attributes", most of these will likely not apply to your manually entered messages except for "Embedded Link" and "Embedded Phone Number". If you commonly add a link or phone number to messages, Section 8.12.2 and Section 8.12.3 should be read and understood as these can easily trigger a review of your messaging campaign if you don't follow the recommendations.

However, there are some non-optional choices like Subscriber Opt-In which your customer must allow for.

Always check No on Number Pooling. Number pooling is a lengthy process for requests for over 49 numbers for a campaign, and usually incurs a $5,000 fee for the review process.

 

The Campaign Description should be something about how your customer is using messaging, and some sample messages they might send are required to help TCR in evaluating the use-case and content.

And finally, the list of telephone numbers (TNs) that should be allowed to send/receive SMS/MMS messages as part of this campaign.

 

Brand/Campaign Registration Successful

Once you are notified in the TCR portal that your customer's brand and campaign registrations are successful, you will need to send the brand and campaign IDs to us for the next steps to complete the process. You must wait for all registrations to be completed before sending the information to us. We cannot complete the next steps on our side without being able to pull the Campaign IDs, and only successful ones are available to us.

One additional bit of information we need is specific to AT&T approval. This will show in your TCR portal.

 

One everything is approved, send an email to MessagingUseCase@inteliquent.com. Please include the following:

Subject Line: SMS/MMS Brand/Campaign Registration for UCaaS Whitelabel Partner

Body: Indicate you are registering a Brand and Campaign. Include the following information:

1. Partner Name - Use your Atlas Partner Setup name
2. Brand ID (from TCR – starts with B)
3. Brand Name (helpful for you to identify the brand)
4. Campaign ID (from TCR – starts with a C)
5. Campaign Class (AT&T specific value on the campaign page above)
6. Campaign Start Date (when it was registered)
7. Campaign Description (helpful for you to identify campaign)
8. List of TNs which should be provisioned to the campaign (limit is 49 numbers without a pooling request)

 

Once we have verified the brand and campaign IDs were successfully created, we will enable messaging for the numbers that were registered with the campaign.

If you know your Customer Success representative, you can reach out to them for any issues with the next steps.

 

Fees

The Campaign Registry (TCR) and T-Mobile charge fees for their various services. Most fees will be billed directly to you, the CSP, by TCR on your account. However, T-Mobile currently charges an additional fee. The fees that we will be passing through are the following:

 

Penalties

Watch your customer's content. There are heavy penalties that will be passed on especially by T-Mobile for any content violations. Some examples include the following:

 

If we are charged one of these fees due to a violation of one of your brands/campaigns, we will pass these on to you. Repeated violations will result in the brand being blocked from future messaging campaigns.

 

Other operators may add penalties in the future.