'Terrible' SMS Campaign Registration Prompt UCaaS, CCaaS Migrations

A slow and laborious SMS campaign registration process and SMS non-functionality are leading many business customers to switch their unified communications and contact center platforms.

Businesses and the channel partners that service them report long wait times and frustrating rejections as they seek the approval of The Campaign Registry (TCR) for application-to-person (A2P) text messaging campaigns. The specific type of texting is through 10DLC (10-digit long codes) phone numbers that send SMS messages to a business' clients or employees. More specifically, 10DLC goes through communications service providers that play in the UCaaS and CCaaS markets.

Those vendors, and their customers and channel partners, have faced stiff challenges registering A2P campaigns in a prompt manner. Customers must ensure that their websites are GDPR-compliant. Partners report wait times of up to eight weeks for registration notice, and many of them meet rejections from The Campaign Registry or direct connect aggregators (DCAs) that mobile carriers leverage. Vendors have informed customers of heavy backlogs of applications that they are processing.

Amid this market challenge, one cloud communications vendor in particular has shut off its U.S.-based SMS services after threat actors sent phishing URLs through some of the carrier's customer accounts.

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North Atlantic's Michael Agri

"I've got healthcare providers that rely on that vendor for confirming appointments and sending all kinds of stuff, and those are the folks that are really hurting. That's probably like maybe 18 to 20% of their user base," said North Atlantic Consultant's Michael Agri.

Some providers, like Volli Communications, initially shut off SMS until they fully understood the situation.

Volli's Joshua Schluep

"The penalties are massive if there's an infraction," said Joshua Schluep, director of channel at Volli.

What Is The Campaign Registry?

Think of the rules around 10DLC as a text-focused version of the STIR/SHAKEN regulations the FCC mandated to ensure that carriers were verifying caller IDs and mitigating robocalls. That STIR/SHAKEN framework did not address text messaging, the FCC noted in 2022.

The Campaign Registry exists as the agreed upon collection hub for major U.S. wireless carriers as they meet their government-ordered obligation of preventing spam texting. The Campaign Registry kicked off in 2021, but the real friction of SMS campaign registration seems to have picked up in a big way in 2023 and again earlier this year. Agri said the problem seem to break open in February.

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"At the same time as we were having issues with registrations, we were also seeing changes being made at the federal level, where they were changing the law to enhance it and make it easier, but in a reality they were making it harder," said Agri, who estimates that 25-30% of his UCaaS customers rely on text messaging in their day-to-day business.

Often those tweaks led to customers needing to change more parts of their websites.

"It can be petty things," Schluep told Channel Futures. "We recently had one rejected because the customer didn't have proper information on their website. And the customers just don't know any of this, so they're like, 'What do you mean I need to have this on my website?'"

Approaches to SMS Campaign Registration

Communication service providers are tackling 10DLC registration in different ways.

Some, like Volli, have brought in a partner. Volli in 2023 announced a partnership with CM.com around TCR compliance. CM.com takes a questionnaire from end users about their A2P campaigns, collects all the relevant information and goes to the TCR on their behalf.

"There are companies out there who specialize in SMS and help manage the campaign registry for the customer so the customer understands why it's being rejected, what information is missing, what they need to do to fix that, instead of just doing it all themselves and not understanding why it was rejected, or what that rejection actually means," Schluep said.

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Other providers have bulked up their in-person support. Capacity, for example, maintains a dedicated compliance team.

Schluep said transparency is key for partners who are selling UCaaS and CCaaS solutions with SMS capabilities. The partners who clearly define expectations for the customer at the beginning will save themselves headaches.

"If you want to get into SMS, it's going to be a process. It's going to be lengthy. Really it's unavoidable," he said. "Being as as transparent as you can in the beginning, truly understanding what you're using SMS for, how you're using it, and what your methods for that are. "

In the meantime, communications providers are sitting in limbo, Schluep said.

"It's a wait and see right now. We do see some pushback, and I think if we see enough pushback and enough people's voices are being heard, I would hope that this would change how it's going currently," he said. "Because the way it's going currently is terrible. It's sort of the wild west right now, because it was implemented so quickly. So many companies were scrambling."