Set up your phone and texting

Calling and texting from inside your CRM puts every conversation on the client’s record automatically — no more scrolling your personal phone trying to remember what you told someone in August.

Getting there is two jobs, and they are not the same size:

	Add a phone number	Get texting approved
What it is	Buying a number in your account	Registering your business with the phone carriers
Time	About 5 minutes	Days to a couple of weeks
Who does it	You	Us, for most people — or you, if you’d rather
Blocks what if skipped	Everything	Texting only. Calling still works

The first job is easy. The second one is a wall, and it’s the reason people sit there wondering why a test text vanished into nothing. Read the wall section before you do anything else.

The short version: talk to us before you start the registration

Client Streamline handles carrier registration for most of our customers. It’s fiddly, rejections are common, and a bad submission costs you days. Reach out and we’ll either do it with you or do it for you. The full do-it-yourself instructions are in this article if you’d rather run it yourself — but you don’t have to, and most people shouldn’t.

The wall: texting doesn’t work until carriers approve you

Texting from a business number in the U.S. is not like texting from your cell phone. Before your number can send a single business text, the wireless carriers require your business to be registered with them. That registration is called A2P 10DLC — “application-to-person, 10-digit long code,” which is just industry-speak for a business (not a human thumb) sending texts from a normal 10-digit phone number.

This is not our rule and it isn’t a setting we can flip. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile built this system to stop the flood of spam texts, and they enforce it at their own network edge — before your message ever reaches the person you’re texting. Every business texting from a normal number goes through it, whatever software they use.

What happens if you skip it

Nothing dramatic, which is exactly the problem. You send a text, it looks like it went, and it simply never arrives. The message comes back rejected with error 30034 — “number not A2P compliant” and the carrier drops it. No bounce to the client. No warning. Just silence — and you, assuming the CRM is broken.

Your automations behave the same way. Appointment reminders, follow-up sequences, birthday texts — if they text, they die at the same wall. So do not build your follow-up around SMS and then discover this a week before your busiest season.

Calling works right away. Only texting waits.

Registration governs text messages. Once you’ve got a number, you can place and receive calls immediately, and every call still logs to the contact’s record. So you’re not dead in the water while approval is pending — you just can’t text yet.

You may read elsewhere that you can “start texting the same day”

You’ll find older guidance floating around claiming you can text while registration is pending and your messages will merely get filtered. That is out of date. Current carrier rules block unregistered business texting to U.S. numbers outright. Treat texting as off until you have an approval, and don’t schedule anything that depends on it.

Step 1 — Add your phone number

Your number isn’t handed to you automatically. You pick it and add it yourself, and it takes about five minutes.

1. Open Settings from the left menu.
2. Go to Phone System, then the Phone Numbers tab. (Phone System also holds Regulatory Bundles, Messaging, Voice, Trust Center, and Additional Settings — you’ll be back here.)
3. Click + Add Number, then choose Add Phone Number.
4. Choose your country.
5. Use Filters to narrow the list. This is where you set the area code you want — you can match digits at the start of the number — and confirm the number supports SMS, MMS, and Voice.
6. Choose Local, not Toll Free — unless you’ve read the next section and decided otherwise. Everything in this article, the entire registration path, assumes a local number.
7. Pick a number from the list. Don’t like the options? Refresh Results pulls a new batch.
8. Click Proceed to Buy.

Local or toll-free?

The filter offers both, and the choice matters more than it looks — they take two different approval routes, so picking toll-free means the rest of this article doesn’t apply to you.

Take a local number if you’re calling and texting people one at a time in a market you serve. That’s almost everyone. A familiar area code gets answered; an unfamiliar one gets ignored, and a toll-free number reads as a call center to exactly the people who screen their calls hardest. Local numbers register through A2P 10DLC — the brand-and-campaign process this article walks you through.

Consider toll-free only if you’re a national operation with no home market to sound local in, or you want one memorable number to advertise. Toll-free goes through toll-free verification instead — a different submission, a different queue, and a different failure code (30032, not 30034). It isn’t harder, but it is different, and none of the registration steps below will match what you see.

It’s your call. Just make it deliberately, and tell us if you go toll-free so we point you at the right process instead of this one.

Choosing an area code

Pick the area code your clients recognize. Someone in your own town is far more likely to answer a number that looks like theirs than one from across the country.

If your exact area code has nothing available, take a neighboring or overlay area code in the same market rather than a random one. Close enough still reads as local.

A number costs money to rent, and calls and texts cost money to send

Phone numbers carry a monthly rental fee, and calling and texting are billed by usage. These are carrier costs, not Client Streamline fees, and they change — ask us for current pricing rather than trusting a number you read somewhere.

Step 2 — Decide who does your registration

This is the real decision point in this article.

Your situation	Do this
You want it handled	Reach out to us. We do most of our customers’ registrations. Bring your business details and we’ll take it from there.
Registration was rejected and you don’t know why	Reach out to us. Rejection codes are cryptic and the fixes are specific. This is the worst time to guess.
You want to run it yourself	Keep reading. Everything you need is below.

Either way, the information required is the same — so the “before you start” checklist below applies to you regardless of who clicks the buttons.

Before you start: what registration actually asks for

Registration has two parts, and you do them in order:

• Your Brand — who you are. Your legal business identity, verified against public records.
• Your Campaign — what you’ll be texting and who said you could. Your use case, your sample messages, and proof that your clients consented.

Brand comes first. The Campaign is submitted after the Brand is approved.

Which brand type are you?

This is a genuine fork, and the two paths have different requirements and different limits. Do not assume what’s true of one is true of the other.

	Standard Brand	Sole Proprietor Brand
Who it’s for	A registered business — LLC, S-corp, corporation	An individual with no tax ID at all, operating under their own name
Requires an EIN	Yes	No — and if you have one, you must use Standard
Business address	Physical address. P.O. boxes are rejected	A U.S. address; P.O. boxes are accepted
Extra verification step	None	A one-time code texted to a real mobile phone — a cell carrier’s number. Landlines, VoIP, and Google Voice numbers are rejected
Sending limits	Higher, and scaled by a trust score assigned during vetting	Low and fixed. One campaign, one phone number, no trust score
Lead-generation use cases	Allowed if consent is genuinely yours	Not allowed

Most people reading this are a Standard Brand. If you have an LLC and an EIN, that’s your path — and it’s the better one. Sole Proprietor exists for someone who genuinely has no business entity; it works, but it caps you at a single number and low volume, and there is no way to raise those limits without re-registering as a Standard Brand later.

Have these in hand before you open the form

Your business identity (for the Brand):

• Your legal business name, exactly as the IRS has it. Not your DBA, not your marketing name, not what’s on your business card. If you’re “Sample Insurance Group LLC” to the IRS, then “Sample Insurance” will fail.
• Your EIN, matching that name. Pull out your CP-575 (the letter the IRS sent when your EIN was issued) and read it off that. Lost it? Call the IRS and request a 147C letter, which restates the same information. Guessing from memory is how brands get rejected.
• Your physical business address — no P.O. boxes on a Standard Brand.
• Your business website URL, business email, and an authorized representative’s name, title, email, and phone.

Your messaging plan (for the Campaign):

• A use case description — who’s sending, who’s receiving, and why.
• At least two sample messages — real ones, in the shape you’ll actually send.
• Proof of how people consent to be texted, and a privacy policy and terms that back it up. This is the part that sinks most submissions. See below.

A brand-new EIN may not pass yet

Registration checks your EIN against public business records, and a freshly issued EIN takes time to propagate into those databases. A brand using an EIN issued within roughly the last two weeks can be rejected for that reason alone — through no fault of yours. If you just formed your LLC, don’t be surprised by a verification failure, and be ready to wait it out rather than resubmitting the same information over and over. If you’re up against a deadline, tell us — that changes the plan.

The consent paperwork, in plain English

Carriers won’t approve you on your word that clients agreed to be texted. They want to see it, and a human reviewer has to be able to verify it from the outside. That means:

A publicly reachable privacy policy — no login wall — that addresses your text messaging specifically. The rule the reviewer applies is narrow and precise: your policy must say that mobile numbers and SMS opt-in consent are not shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes.

Read that carefully, because it is routinely over-read:

• It governs mobile numbers and texting consent. It is not a rule about all of your client data.
• It governs sharing for marketing or promotional purposes. Sharing information with subcontractors and service providers who support your operations — customer service and the like — is explicitly permitted.

Do not delete truthful disclosures from your privacy policy to pass registration

Every business shares client information with the partners and vendors it runs on, and often it is required to disclose that sharing. In insurance, for example, an agent has to share client information with carriers and FMOs to place a policy at all — and is very likely legally obligated to disclose that in a privacy policy. Those disclosures are accurate and they belong there.

Do not strip them out to chase an A2P approval. Removing a truthful, required disclosure from a legal document to satisfy a texting registration is a far worse outcome than a failed registration: you’d be manufacturing a real compliance problem to solve a paperwork one.

The reviewer’s rule is narrow — it’s about mobile numbers and text-message consent not being shared for marketing — so the direction of the fix is to make your SMS-specific language clear, not to gut the rest of the policy. What that document should actually say is a question for your own attorney or compliance counsel, not something to improvise and not something we can answer for you.

Terms and conditions that state who you are, what texts you’ll send, how often, that message and data rates may apply, that carriers aren’t liable for undelivered messages, and how to stop — “Text STOP to opt out,” “Reply HELP for help.”

Evidence of how consent is collected. If it’s a form on your website, the reviewer follows the link and looks at it: the consent checkbox must be unchecked by default, must be optional (the form has to submit without it), and marketing consent must be a separate checkbox from appointment and service messages. Bundling them into one box is a rejection.

No website form? You still have a path.

Plenty of businesses don’t collect consent through a web form. They get it on paper, in person, or verbally on an inbound call. Both are acceptable — but the proof has to be submittable:

• Paper form: photograph the consent language on your form and host the image somewhere with a public link.
• Verbal: write out the exact script you use to ask for texting permission, word for word, as a transcript.

What you cannot do is skip it. “They’re my clients” is not consent a carrier can verify.

Writing sample messages that pass

Weak samples are one of the top rejection causes. A sample message must include the recipient’s name as a bracketed field, your name, your business name, and opt-out language — and it has to match the use case you declared.

A sample that passes:

Hi [First Name], it’s Jane Sample with Sample Insurance Group. Confirming your Medicare plan review on Thursday at 10:00am. Reply STOP to opt out.

A sample that gets rejected:

You have an upcoming appointment.

No business name, no sender, no opt-out, no way for a reviewer to tie it to a real company. Submit at least two — one appointment/service message and, if you’ll be sending them, one promotional message. Use your real business name in them, not a placeholder like [Company Name].

Your use case description gets the same treatment. Write it like you’re explaining it to a skeptical stranger, because you are:

Messages are sent by Sample Insurance Group to clients and prospects who requested a Medicare plan review and gave written or verbal permission to be contacted by text. Messages confirm appointments, send reminders, and answer plan questions. We do not text purchased lists.

Not: “This campaign sends messages to customers.” That gets rejected.

Step 3 — Submit the registration

If we’re handling it, stop here and send us your checklist. If you’re doing it yourself:

1. Open Settings, then Phone System, then the Trust Center tab.

   Can’t see the Trust Center?

   That’s a permissions matter, not a bug. Account admins can reach it; standard users often can’t, depending on how permissions are set. If it isn’t there, ask whoever administers your account — or just send us your checklist and we’ll submit it for you.

2. Choose Start Registration. The Trust Center walks you through a sequence of panels — Business → Brand → Campaign → Consent — and won’t let you skip ahead.

   If your screen looks different

   An older Trust Center view still exists, and it lays the same information out differently (you’ll find campaigns under a Brands & Campaigns section rather than in a guided sequence). The information it asks for is the same. Fill in what it asks; the checklist below still applies.

3. Complete your Brand — legal name, EIN, business type, industry, physical address, website, and authorized representative. Copy the legal name and EIN straight off your CP-575 or 147C letter. Character for character.

4. Submit the Brand and wait for approval. You cannot register a campaign against an unapproved brand.

5. Once the Brand clears, complete the Campaign.

6. Fill in the campaign: use case, use case description, sample messages, how contacts opt in (and the URL or hosted proof), your opt-in message, your privacy policy URL, and your terms & conditions URL.

7. Submit. The campaign goes out for carrier review.

8. When the campaign is approved, your phone number must be attached to it. A number that isn’t linked to an approved campaign still can’t text — see troubleshooting.

How long this really takes

Anyone who gives you one number for this is guessing. Here’s the honest shape of it:

• Brand submission: minutes, if your information is ready and correct.
• Brand vetting: often fast, but if anything about your business needs a second look it can run up to about a week.
• Sole Proprietor brands: commonly approved in roughly 24–72 hours, subject to carrier checks.
• Campaign review: this is the variable one. Days, and longer if it comes back rejected — every rejection restarts the clock.
• After approval: there’s a short settling period before every carrier’s network reflects your registration, so a test text can still fail right after you’re approved. If it’s still failing a day later, don’t keep waiting — that’s usually a number that was never linked to the campaign, not propagation. See the troubleshooting section.

Plan for a week or two from start to first working text, and more if you get rejected once — which is common. There is usually a paid expedite option for brand vetting; ask us whether it’s worth it for your situation.

Start this on day one. Not the week your big campaign is supposed to go out.

What it costs

There are real costs to registration. One-time fees to register your brand and your campaign, and recurring carrier fees on the campaign for as long as it’s active. These are set by the carriers and the registry that administers this system — not by us — and they change them regularly.

For that reason we don’t publish amounts here: any figure we printed would be wrong within a few months and you’d budget off a stale number. Ask us and we’ll tell you what it costs today. The same goes for what happens fee-wise if a submission is rejected and resubmitted — that handling has changed over time and depends on why you were rejected.

Carrier approval is not legal compliance

Everything above this line is mechanics — the conditions the phone carriers impose before they’ll carry your traffic. Satisfy them and your texts get delivered.

Delivered is not the same as lawful. An approved campaign means the carriers will move your messages. It says nothing about whether the way you are texting complies with the law. Those are two different systems, run by two different sets of authorities, and clearing one does not clear you with the other. You can hold a perfectly valid A2P campaign and still be breaking the law.

Two things you should know exist, and then go look into properly:

• Federal law governs consent for calls and texts to consumers — principally the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The obligation is yours, not your software’s: Client Streamline enforces STOP and keeps the record, but no platform can consent on a contact’s behalf.
• Some states go further than federal law, and a few — Texas notably — regulate text messaging specifically. Which rules reach you depends on where you operate and where your contacts are.

That’s the whole of what we’ll tell you, and it’s deliberate. Where the line falls for your business is a question for your own attorney or compliance counsel, and for the official federal and state sources. Go find out what applies to you before you start texting at scale.

Client Streamline does not provide legal or compliance guidance

We’ll help you get registered and delivering. That’s a carrier process, and we know it well.

We do not advise on the TCPA, on state texting or solicitation law, or on your industry’s own rules, and nothing in this article is legal advice. We also do not supply a privacy policy, SMS-consent language, or terms and conditions — and you shouldn’t want us to, because those documents have to describe what your business actually does with your clients’ information.

Anything we could say here about the law would be a snapshot that goes stale — the rules genuinely do change, and they have changed recently. Verifying what’s current, and what applies to you, is your responsibility. Get it from your counsel and from the official sources themselves.

What “done” looks like

Not “the status says approved.” Approved plus propagated plus actually delivering. Test it:

1. Create a test contact — call them Jane Sample — using a personal cell number you can pick up.
2. Open the contact and, from Conversations, send a short text.
3. Confirm it arrives on the handset, and that it appears in the thread on Jane Sample’s record.
4. Reply from your cell. Confirm the reply lands back in Conversations on that record.
5. Place a test call from the contact record and confirm it connects and logs.

Send and receive, both directions, plus a call. That’s done. If the send silently fails, go to troubleshooting — and note the error code shown on the message in Conversations. That code tells you exactly which problem you have.

Troubleshooting

Your brand was rejected

Symptom: The brand comes back rejected, often citing a mismatch.

Why: Your legal business name and EIN didn’t match the official records. This is the most common brand rejection, and it’s almost always small: a missing “LLC,” a DBA used instead of the registered entity name, a transposed digit in the EIN, an old address, or a P.O. box where a physical address is required. Very new EINs can also fail simply because they haven’t propagated into the verification databases yet.

Fix: Get your CP-575 or request a 147C from the IRS and copy the legal name and EIN exactly as printed — including punctuation and the entity suffix. Use your physical address. If the EIN was issued in the last couple of weeks, the fix may simply be to wait; nothing you retype will make it verify sooner.

Your campaign was rejected

Symptom: Brand approved, campaign rejected — usually with one or more codes.

Why: Campaign rejections cluster into four families, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re in:

• Consent problems. Pre-checked opt-in boxes. Consent bundled into one checkbox instead of separating marketing from service messages. Consent required in order to submit the form. An opt-in flow the reviewer couldn’t find or follow.
• Website problems. Privacy policy missing, behind a login, or broken. No terms and conditions. A privacy policy that reads as though mobile numbers or texting consent could be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing. A site with too little information about the business to confirm it’s real.
• Identity mismatches. The brand name doesn’t match the website. A DBA used inconsistently. A registered company submitted as a sole proprietor. A personal email address instead of a business one.
• Weak content. Sample messages with no business name or no opt-out language. Samples that don’t match the declared use case. A use-case description too vague to evaluate.

Fix: Open the rejection in the Trust Center and work through every listed reason — a campaign can be rejected for several at once, and fixing only some of them gets you rejected again. Correct all of them, then resubmit.

If the rejection points at your privacy policy, re-read the caution above before you edit anything. The direction of the fix is to make your SMS-consent language clear — not to delete legitimate disclosures about the information you share with the partners and vendors your business depends on (in insurance, carriers and FMOs; in another business, whoever plays that role).

If your rejection was for content the carriers prohibit outright — the categories they flatly refuse — resubmitting won’t help. That’s a “call us” situation, not a “try again” situation.

The one that catches people: purchased leads

Consent cannot be bought, sold, or handed to you by someone else. A lead vendor’s opt-in is not your opt-in, and a campaign built around texting purchased lists is a rejection — or, if it slips through, a spam complaint problem later. Text the people who agreed to hear from you. Call the rest.

Registration says approved, but texts still fail with error 30034

Symptom: Everything shows approved, and messages still come back 30034 — not A2P compliant.

Why: Nearly always, your phone number isn’t attached to the approved campaign. Approval registers your business; it does not automatically enroll every number you own. This bites people who buy a new number after registering — the campaign is approved, but that number was never linked to it, so as far as the carriers are concerned it’s still an unregistered sender.

There is also a short settling period right after approval before every carrier’s network reflects it. If you were approved in the last day, that’s worth ruling out first.

Fix: Check the linkage before you wait on anything. If you bought the number after approval, or you’re not sure it’s attached, reach out and we’ll confirm it — don’t sit for days assuming it will sort itself out, because an unlinked number never will.

Texts send but never arrive — error 30007

Symptom: Messages leave the system, don’t bounce, but the client never sees them. The status shows 30007 — message filtered.

Why: You’re registered, but the carrier’s spam filter blocked that message. Registration gets you onto the network; it doesn’t make your content immune. Common triggers: link shorteners (bit.ly and friends are heavily abused and heavily filtered), plain http:// links instead of https://, spam-shaped copy, blasting the same identical message from several numbers, and messages whose content has nothing to do with the use case you registered.

Fix: Drop link shorteners entirely — use your full domain. Write like a person writing to one person. Keep what you send consistent with what you registered. If a specific message keeps getting filtered, change the message, not the number.

One contact never receives anything — error 21610

Symptom: Texts to a single client fail while everyone else’s go through.

Why: They opted out. When someone replies STOP (or UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT), consent is revoked immediately: any queued messages fail, and a permanent do-not-disturb flag is set on that contact.

Fix: There is nothing to fix — the system is doing its job, and overriding an opt-out is exactly the thing you must not do. Only the client can undo it, by texting back to start again. Call them instead, if calling is appropriate.

A contact’s texts fail with error 30006

Symptom: Failures on a handful of contacts, consistently.

Why: The number is a landline (or otherwise can’t receive SMS). Plenty of contact lists are full of them — especially older lists, and books of business built over years by phone.

Fix: Nothing to repair — mark it and call instead. If you’re seeing this across a big chunk of an imported list, that list needs cleaning; see Import your clients.

Your number isn’t ringing you

Symptom: Calls to your CRM number don’t reach you, or inbound texts don’t surface.

Why: Inbound routing is configured per number. If no user is set to ring and no forwarding number is set, an inbound call has nowhere to land.

Fix: Open the number’s configuration under Settings → Phone System → Phone Numbers and set what should happen on an inbound call — ring specific users, forward to your cell, or go to voicemail. Inbound texts always appear in Conversations on the contact’s record; if a text arrives from a number that isn’t a saved contact, the system creates a new contact for it, so check there before assuming it’s lost.

After approval: know your volume ceiling

Approval is permission to text, not permission to blast. Your sending is throttled, and the ceiling depends on the brand type you registered:

• Sole Proprietor brands are deliberately small: one campaign, one phone number, and low fixed throughput. The published limits currently work out to roughly a thousand messages a day to one major carrier’s subscribers, with a separate per-minute cap on another. That’s fine for a normal book of clients and useless for mass texting — and there’s no way to raise it. The only upgrade path is registering as a Standard Brand.
• Standard Brands are vetted and assigned a trust score, and that score sets your throughput. A higher score buys more messages per second.

These limits are set by the carriers and get revised; treat the specifics as “roughly this,” not as a contract. If you’re working a list of a few hundred contacts, none of this will ever be your constraint. If you’re planning a genuine mass send, talk to us first.

Consent, opt-outs, and what never goes in a text

Get permission before the first text, and keep the receipt. For carrier registration, a written opt-in or a recorded verbal script both work as evidence — they just want to see that consent exists. What the law requires of you is a separate, stricter question, and it isn’t one we answer. See Carrier approval is not legal compliance.

Honor STOP immediately and permanently. The system enforces this for you, and you should never work around it — not by re-adding the contact, not by texting them from a different number.

Keep sensitive client information out of SMS. A text sits unlocked on a phone screen and passes through networks you don’t control. Whatever your business treats as confidential does not belong in one — in insurance, that means no health conditions, no diagnoses, no policy or claim details tied to a name. “Let’s review your plan Thursday” is fine. The specifics belong in a call or the platform’s secure channels, not in a text message.

Next step

While registration is in review, keep moving — calling works today, and there’s no reason to sit and wait.

Bring your contacts in so they’re ready the moment texting turns on → Import your clients.

Haven’t connected your mailbox yet? → Connect your email.