If your business relies on toll-free messaging, you are well acquainted with toll-free verification.
Not familiar with toll-free verification or toll-free messaging in general? Let’s do a quick overview!
Snapshot: The state of toll-free messaging
Since the early 2000s, toll-free numbers have had the ability to send text messages. Businesses often use toll-free messaging if they require large-scale A2P text messaging – it’s an ideal way to deliver notifications, alerts, surveys, marketing, and customer support.
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In addition, toll-free services continue to be predominately used for enterprise voice communications which can be combined with A2P text messaging to enable a great customer experience – giving customers the ability to place a phone call directly from their message inbox.
What’s the deal with verification?
Toll-free has a process called toll-free verification that qualifies the messaging traffic and indicates that your number has carrier approval to send within the U.S. and Canada. Since September 30, 2022, all messaging-enabled toll-free numbers have had to complete the toll-free verification process to achieve maximum throughput.
To become verified, a number must go through a review process that looks at the sender – the business sending the message – and the use case – why you’re sending messages. Verification status is unique to the number, which means you don’t verify the business, you have to verify every number used by that business.
Why toll-free verification matters
While creating an additional step for businesses, verification is designed to protect mobile subscribers from fraudulent and SPAM messages. If you choose to delay or forgo verification, your message throughput will be severely reduced and your messages will be more likely to get flagged by SPAM and fraud filters. At Bandwidth, verification is considered a “must” so that we can deliver the best experience possible related to message throughput and support.
This represents the toll-free messaging throughput limits for restricted numbers and pending numbers. Restricted numbers refer to toll-free numbers that either haven’t been submitted for verification yet or were denied verification. Pending numbers refer to toll-free numbers that have been submitted for verification but haven’t heard back yet.
Toll-free verification can take a toll on you
Getting toll-free numbers verified by the toll-free aggregator is a highly manual and time-consuming process. The recent news from the toll-free aggregator about reduced traffic limits when toll-free numbers are in restricted and pending statuses is a double whammy.
Not only is this added overhead, but this can also prevent your business from scaling its messaging effectively.
Bandwidth gets it. That’s why we’re launching a Toll-Free Verification API to help you navigate the process more quickly and easily than ever before.
Reduce your toll-free verification turnaround
Bandwidth’s toll-free verification API automates the toll-free verification submission process, getting it into review of the toll-free aggregator quickly for no additional cost. Additionally, our customers will receive notifications via webhooks to inform them when the verification has been completed and, if denied, will provide the reasoning. This enables our customers to streamline the verification process and achieve their maximum messaging throughput as fast as possible.
Bandwidth’s toll-free verification API is just one example of how we help businesses scale messaging from basic to large-scale implementations effortlessly.
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