Business texting is now a core workflow for service teams, field operations, customer support, and internal coordination. As more communication moves to SMS, IT ends up responsible for the governance, identity controls, and compliance rules that decide what gets delivered and what gets blocked.
Carriers, regulators, and industry frameworks have tightened their requirements. That includes 10DLC registration, consent management, opt-out enforcement, identity verification, and long-term record retention. When these pieces break, messages fail to deliver, campaigns get throttled, and companies expose themselves to regulatory risk.
Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), organizations can face $500 to $1,500 per unlawful text, and those penalties have driven multi-million-dollar judgments. One compliance slip can escalate fast, especially at scale.
Momentum Messaging, powered by Clerk Chat, brings business texting into Microsoft Teams and Webex under the compliance, security, and authentication models IT already manages. It removes the guesswork and gives organizations a controlled path to scale SMS safely. Are you looking to scale business texting? Here are 11 important things to help you create a compliant business texting program.
1. Understand how 10DLC rules shape business texting
10DLC is now required for any business sending A2P SMS in the United States. Carriers use it to reduce spam, verify senders, and control message throughput. Because of this, SMS delivery depends on how accurately your organization is registered.
Every business must submit two pieces of information:
- Your brand: Legal entity details, EIN, address, and website.
- Your campaign: Why you’re messaging, how users opted in, and sample messages.
Carriers check this information closely. If anything is inconsistent, including opt-in language, use-case description, or sample content, messages get throttled or blocked.
Most approval delays happen because registration forms were submitted incorrectly. Momentum Messaging, powered by Clerk Chat, manages this workflow end-to-end and ensures your data is complete, accurate, and compliant.
Takeaway: 10DLC drives whether your texts reach customers at all. Understanding these rules helps IT keep delivery reliable and avoid unnecessary carrier filters.
2. Make campaign registration accurate the first time
Campaign registration is the main factor carriers use to decide whether to deliver or throttle your messages. Even small mistakes like an outdated website, unclear opt-in language, or a use case that doesn’t match sample messages can cause rejections or slow approvals.
Carriers want consistent, verifiable details. That includes:
- Brand data: Legal name, EIN, address, and website.
- Use case: A clear explanation of why you send messages.
- Sample messages: Content that reflects real-world usage.
- Opt-in method: How recipients gave permission to receive texts.
All of this must align. If it doesn’t, your organization ends up resubmitting forms, waiting on carrier reviews, or dealing with silent delivery issues once traffic goes live.
Momentum Messaging, powered by Clerk Chat, handles registration end-to-end. Your information is validated up front, the right campaign type is selected, and required disclosures are included so carriers approve your campaign without unnecessary delays.
Takeaway: Accurate registration protects deliverability from day one and prevents the operational headaches that come with carrier pushback.
3. Treat consent and opt-outs as non-negotiable compliance controls
SMS compliance starts with permission. Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA), TCPA, and carrier rules all require businesses to prove how a recipient opted in, honor opt-outs immediately, and maintain a complete record of those changes.
Any gap here exposes the organization to fines, delivery issues, or legal challenges.
- Clear opt-in: Recipients must knowingly agree to receive texts. This can come from a form, a checkbox, a keyword reply, or another documented action, but it must be explicit and tied to the intended use case.
- Immediate opt-out enforcement: When someone replies “STOP,” the organization must stop all messaging to that number. Carriers expect this to happen automatically. Manual processes leave room for error and increase compliance risk.
- Audit-ready evidence: Regulators and carriers want proof when consent was given, how it was captured, and when it changed. Inconsistent or missing records can lead to blocked campaigns or penalties.
Momentum Messaging, powered by Clerk Chat, automates all of this. STOP, START, and HELP keywords are enforced in real time. Every consent change is logged, every message is recorded, and IT has a complete audit trail readily available.
Takeaway: Strong consent management protects your program from fines and keeps your traffic trusted by carriers. It’s one of the most important compliance responsibilities for any IT team supporting SMS.
4. Keep identity under IT control with centralized authentication
Unmanaged texting tools create identity gaps that IT can’t track or secure. When employees use personal phones or standalone SMS apps, there’s no reliable way to enforce MFA, apply conditional access, control permissions, or remove access when someone leaves the company. This is one of the biggest compliance and security risks in business texting.
Centralized authentication fixes that. Momentum Messaging, powered by Clerk Chat, uses the identity systems your organization already governs:
- Microsoft Teams authentication
- Webex identity and access control
- Azure AD–based SSO
- Existing MFA and conditional access policies
- Automatic deprovisioning when accounts are disabled
There are no extra logins, separate credentials, or unmanaged devices sending customer-facing messages. IT stays in full control of who can text, when they can text, and which systems enforce the rules.
Takeaway: Identity alignment strengthens compliance, reduces data exposure, and ensures SMS follows the same standards as every other communication channel your organization manages.
5. Use role-based permissions to separate access, duties, and visibility
SMS often gets messy when teams share logins, manage conversations from personal devices, or have broad access they don’t actually need. This creates compliance gaps, makes audits harder, and increases the risk of sensitive information reaching the wrong people.
Role-based permissions give IT the structure required to control access and enforce proper separation of duties. With Momentum Messaging, powered by Clerk Chat, each user is assigned the level of access appropriate for their role:
- Members: Handle day-to-day conversations.
- Managers: Oversee queues, assignments, and workload distribution.
- Admins: Configure routing, inboxes, and system behavior.
- Workspace owners: Maintain full visibility and technical governance.
These permission tiers help IT contain risk by ensuring that customer information, internal routing rules, and compliance settings are only accessible to the right people.
Takeaway: A structured permission model eliminates the shadow workflows that form when teams rely on shared numbers or generic login credentials. Every action is tied to a verified user, which strengthens security, simplifies oversight, and supports a cleaner audit trail.
6. Align SMS records with enterprise retention, archiving, and eDiscovery
SMS can’t sit outside your compliance and data governance policies. Regulators expect organizations to retain message history, document consent, and produce records during audits or investigations. Without an archiving strategy, SMS becomes a blind spot, one that creates risk the moment a customer dispute or regulatory request comes in.
Momentum Messaging, powered by Clerk Chat, integrates directly with enterprise retention and archiving platforms, including Microsoft Purview, Smarsh, and Global Relay.
This allows IT to:
- Apply long-term retention rules
- Capture full message history, including media
- Preserve consent events and opt-out actions
- Support internal investigations and legal holds
- Keep SMS aligned with how email, chat, and voice are governed
When SMS follows the same retention path as your other communication channels, eDiscovery becomes straightforward. There’s a single system of record, consistent policy enforcement, and no manual exporting or reconstruction of message logs.
Takeaway: A unified retention approach turns SMS from a compliance liability into a secure, well-governed communication channel.
7. Centralize business texting inside your collaboration stack
SMS becomes much easier to govern when it lives inside the platforms your organization already uses and secures. Running texting through personal devices or standalone tools fragments identity, scatters records, and creates compliance gaps. Bringing SMS into Microsoft Teams or Webex fixes that.
Momentum Messaging, powered by Clerk Chat, extends your existing collaboration stack with enterprise-grade texting. IT teams gain:
- One policy engine: Security, compliance, and retention rules already in place apply automatically.
- One identity system: SSO, MFA, and conditional access stay consistent across channels.
- One onboarding/offboarding process: New hires get access through standard provisioning, and access shuts off when accounts are disabled.
- Reduction in shadow IT: No more personal numbers used for business communication.
- Higher message reliability: Approved 10DLC campaigns and controlled traffic reduce filtering and throttling.
Takeaway: When SMS sits inside your collaboration ecosystem, governance becomes simpler and more predictable. Teams send messages from the tools they already use, while IT maintains full oversight and compliance alignment across chat, voice, and texting.
8. Follow carrier content rules to avoid filtering and blocked messages
Even with proper 10DLC registration, carriers still evaluate the content of every message. They use CTIA guidelines and internal filtering systems to flag traffic that resembles spam, fraud, or high-risk categories. This is one of the most common reasons compliant organizations see messages silently fail.
High-risk or restricted content includes:
- SHAFT categories (sex, hate, alcohol, firearms, tobacco)
- Payday loans or unlicensed financial offers
- Misleading promotions or unclear “free” claims
- Excessive urgency or legal-sounding threats
- Masked or misleading URLs
- Sweepstakes language without proper disclosures
Carriers can block or throttle a campaign if these patterns appear, even once. For IT, this means compliance must be met for both registration and ensuring day-to-day messages stay within acceptable guidelines.
Takeaway: Monitoring message content reduces accidental filtering and protects your 10DLC reputation over time.
9. Watch messaging frequency and behavioral patterns that affect reputation
Carriers don’t just score content. They also score sender behavior. Even legitimate businesses can trigger spam controls when their sending patterns resemble automated abuse.
Risky patterns include:
- Spikes in volume with no sending history
- High bounce or error rates
- High opt-out rates after campaign launches
- Repetitive or near-identical outbound messages
- Bulk sends without confirmed opt-in
These behaviors degrade your sender reputation and can lower throughput or cause campaigns to be suspended. This often happens quietly, leaving IT teams troubleshooting “delivery issues” that stem from reputation decay rather than technical failure.
Momentum Messaging, powered by Clerk Chat, helps stabilize traffic by routing through approved, compliant 10DLC campaigns that carriers trust.
Takeaway: Consistent, predictable sending patterns help maintain strong deliverability across all carriers.
10. Use trusted URLs and domains to avoid carrier phishing blocks
URL reputation is a major filter point for A2P SMS. Carriers automatically inspect URLs inside messages and score them based on historical behavior, age, redirects, and known spam associations.
Risk factors include:
- Public link shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl, etc.)
- Redirect chains or masked domains
- Newly created domains with no history
- Domains connected to past spam reports
- Inconsistent URL destinations across campaigns
Even if your content is clean, a risky URL can lead to filtering or complete blocking of your SMS traffic. This is especially common in industries using landing pages for scheduling, payments, or promotions.
Using branded domains and consistent, reputable landing pages improves trust and reduces carrier intervention.
Takeaway: URL reputation can make or break deliverability. Use URLs that carriers recognize and trust.
11. Include required disclosures for regulated or sensitive campaign types
Certain SMS use cases require specific disclosures or message structures to stay compliant. Miss one of these details, and carriers may downgrade your campaign or reject messages outright.
Common examples may include:
- Promotional content: May require recurring opt-out reminders.
- Franchise or multi-location brands: Must clearly identify the brand to avoid misleading recipients.
- Data-rate disclosures: Some opt-in flows require “Msg & data rates may apply.”
- Authentication/OTP campaigns: Must follow strict formatting and cannot include marketing content.
- Informational services: Must match the exact use case submitted in 10DLC registration.
These rules exist to protect consumers from misleading or unclear communication. But for IT teams, they often go unnoticed until a carrier flags them.
Momentum Messaging, powered by Clerk Chat, ensures disclosures match the registered campaign, reducing the risk of rejected messages after launch.
Takeaway: Required disclosures vary by campaign type, ensuring they match carrier expectations keeps traffic compliant and predictable.
Improve your SMS compliance posture with Momentum
SMS compliance can be unforgiving. Carrier rules shift, regulations tighten, and one mistake can hurt deliverability or expose your team to unnecessary risk.
Momentum Messaging, powered by Clerk Chat, gives you a secure, governed, and fully registered texting platform inside Microsoft Teams and Webex that’s built for enterprise standards and managed under the tools you already trust.
Momentum can help evaluate your current texting environment, identify compliance gaps, and enable secure, fully registered SMS on your existing phone numbers inside Microsoft Teams and Webex.
Schedule an SMS compliance review session with Momentum to review your business texting and compliance strategy.
