December 14, 2023 // Product
10DLC stands for Ten Digit Long Code (10DLC) and is an industry-led solution and set of standards put in place as an answer to the United States federal mandate to Know Your Customers (KYC) and the TRACED Act.
KYC requires businesses to go through a process to know their customers’ identities and addresses. In telecommunications, this poses a unique set of hurdles for companies wishing to do legitimate business. 10DLC is the industry’s answer to KYC.
10DLC applies to Application-to-Person (A2P) SMS and MMS traffic sent over local numbers — which are traditionally known as “long codes”. Although 10DLC is a relatively new and potentially complex concept for most companies, if you choose the right telecommunications carrier, 10DLC adoption and compliance can be a seamless experience.
Because 10DLC numbers have been sanctioned by the carriers, messages sent using these numbers experience a higher percentage of message delivery at a faster rate than traditional long-code SMS. 10DLC, essentially, is able to achieve two things at the same time:
With the new 10DLC standard in place, trusted senders on long codes can now experience drastically higher messaging throughput and reduced carrier filtering. Prior to 10DLC, A2P messaging over long codes experienced slow delivery speeds and heavy filtering due to the high volume of unsanctioned messages. This left senders with Short Codes, and more recently Toll-Free SMS, as their only reliable options for A2P messaging – which are more costly than long code numbers.
When it comes to customer experience, 10DLC allows you to establish and maintain seamless connections with your customers thanks to the ability to use a single local number for both voice and SMS. For instance, think about the last time you were contacted by your local dentist or doctor’s office. The office was, most likely, able to confirm, make changes to, or cancel your appointment through text all from the same local number. In addition, if you needed to call the office to ask a question before your appointment, you could have called that same number and spoken to a live person in their contact center.
10DLC can help you reduce the touchpoints and amount of friction your customers encounter.
Any company that is going to be sending SMS or MMS to their customers must first register as a trusted sender through The Campaign Registry (TCR), the third-party authority on 10DLC registration. Each sender on 10DLC must have both a Brand and Campaign registered.
How do you register? Companies register with TCR through a Campaign Service Provider (CSP), such as Voxology.
For a more in-depth explanation of how 10DLC works, read this helpful doc.
Every company that is sending SMS or MMS messages to their US customers/users, via ten-digit local numbers, needs to register for 10DLC.
Non-registered traffic will be subject to an increase in message filtering and fines that could severely impact both deliverability and throughput. Read more about A2P 10DLC here.