Navigating Talk and Text Deliverability in Real Estate

Transcript

Danielle Garrett: [00:00:00] So any company, any other real estate platform, any other CRM that allows the sending of text messages, if your account is not registered by 9/1 of this year, phone carriers will block those messages from being sent.

In addition to blocking them, you will also incur penalty charges just for attempting to send the message.

Jennifer O'Connell: Hi, everybody. I am Jennifer O'Connell, Content Brand Manager here at CINC, and I'm with Danielle Garrett, who's the Senior Director of Product Operations, and she's going to share a little bit about the CINC telecom package. So let's start from the beginning.

Can you share what is the CINC telecom package?

Danielle Garrett: Absolutely, so the telecom package was created last year. Once the phone carriers implemented this required texting registration path. And as we were working on implementing this for our clients, we realized that there were several other registration pathways offered by our phone [00:01:00] carrier that would.

Greatly benefit our clients. So we figured we would loop everything all into one package, make it so much easier for our clients to reap the benefits of all of these registrations. And they wouldn't have to worry about anything in a month over month time frame.

So what this includes is going to be:

• A required A2P texting registration
• You'll get a STIR/SHAKEN call verification registration
• A custom caller ID
• Built-in compliant messaging
• And monitoring and support from our Talk & Text team.

Additionally, we've got a new service coming soon that will be our voice integrity. It's another layer of call verification that will prevent calls being marked with nuisance labels.

Let's break down each part of the CINC telecom package, starting with the A2P10DLC required texting registration. The US phone carriers created the required registration pathway about 2 years ago in order to prevent noncompliant messaging practices. I'm sure all of [00:02:00] you have been victim of spam messages from any number of things. But I'm sure you've noticed over the past probably 6 months to a year that those have actually started to drop off, and that's because of this registration.

So, legitimate businesses are registering their brands so that their traffic is being pushed through and then the spam texts are being blocked before it even reaches you at the consumer. So as kind of cumbersome as it has been for our industry, it's working out in our favor so that we know that our registered legitimate traffic is being pushed through. And when a consumer receives it, they know that it's coming from a real business, and it's something that they should reply to.

Additionally, I should mention that carriers have been giving us several deadlines over the past two years to get this implemented. At some point, they do have to take an action. So that point is going to be September 1st of this year. They will start blocking all unregistered traffic. They, have to draw a line in the sand somewhere.[00:03:00]

We have been working on this for a few years with our existing client base. We've got a great number of clients registered. So just keep those coming in. Once we hit that deadline, any unregistered traffic will not be sent until your registration goes through. And those do take a couple of weeks to process. So make sure you get those in right away. And if you're unsure about your status, please reach out to your account manager.

Another offering in the CINC Telecom package is a STIR/SHAKEN and a CNAM registration. What are these crazy acronyms? So STIR/SHAKEN is a phone number verification system that prevents caller spoofing. A bad actor can take your phone number and spoof it to where it looks like the call that they're making is coming from you. What this registration does is ensure that the phone carrier can verify that it's coming from you from your number and going to the correct recipient so that [00:04:00] things like that can't happen.

The CNAM is a custom caller ID name. So this is great for us, especially in the real estate industry to get our branding out there. You can put your business name, you can put your team name. Anything that you would like as long as it falls under that 15 character limit. So with a lot of us, sometimes we have longer business names. So please feel free to call our Talk & Text team if you do have one of those longer names. We can help you with some best practices on how to abbreviate it or maybe something else that we could get creative with to use that represents your team.

So again, having both of these registration ensures that your calls are being made from a legitimate business and the carriers will push them through without adding any of those nuisance labels like potential spam or spam. Without them, that's what a lot of those bad actors are getting, and we will automatically see those on our phones and know we won't pick up that call.

Another thing that agents should do - this is not a part [00:05:00] of the telecom package because it's kind of separate - It's a part of the FCC. But you should go to freecallerregistry.com and register all of your personal cell phone numbers that you use for work - yours, your agents', anyone on your team. That way, if you are ever out in the field and you're just texting someone from your personal cell or making a quick call, that number is also registered. Just a little tip there.

Coming soon is the Voice Integrity registration path. That's going to be an additional layer of call verification that will also help remediate spam labels. And it's also going to eventually give CINC the ability to monitor each one of your CINC agent numbers and their reputations.

So when you're a client of CINC, we provide CINC agent numbers so that you can use the CINC dialer and texting via the CINC platform. And so, our Talk & Text team will be able to get reports on those numbers and how they're doing with their calls. If anything was [00:06:00] marked as spam by a lead or a call isn't going through or failing for whatever reason, and obviously the same thing with texting deliverability. making sure that your texts are going through and all of your registrations are staying intact.

I mentioned a couple of times about CINC's Talk & Text team. This is a huge part of our telecom package. This team is comprised of our tech support team, some developers, some product directors, myself, our client services team. They get a lot of great feedback from our existing clients on their needs.

So what do they do for us?

So first thing being compliance.

Compliance, I know, is one of those boring things that nobody loves to hear about, but something that we maintain on your behalf, so that the clients don't have to worry about constantly adding compliant messaging into their text messages.

So, a part of the A2P registration requirements is that in at least the initial text that [00:07:00] you send to a lead, it needs to include how they can opt out of your messages if they so choose and who sent them that message so that's clear. So we've automated that into the system already. So you don't have to worry about it. And we optimize these on an ongoing basis. And what I mean by that is that obviously we have to have certain language in there that's required, but we do have a little bit of leeway in playing with the surrounding language and where we put it in the message, whether it's at the beginning or the end, and exactly what it looks like. So we run tests on those constantly to make sure that we are giving you the best compliant message, but also the best looking for deliverability purposes.

Our team will also provide support for any questions that you have about the package. What it involves. How do I register? The costs?

So there are a lot of costs that are involved on each 1 of these registrations. And some [00:08:00] of them happen up front. Some of them are ongoing. Some of them happen monthly. And so what we did was we worked the math on all of these ongoing costs and put them into a $30 a month management fee. So this, covers not only those ongoing fees and everything, your registration, and the Talk & Text team support. That way, we are managing everything for you. You don't have to worry about these ebb and flow costs. CINC's got that covered.

We will also monitor your account. So this is another part for the Talk & Text team to make sure that your registration maintains, your texting deliverability, your calls are going through. And if anything should hiccup along the way, we are going to notice it before you. We don't want you calling and telling us those things.

Our team is always constantly looking for new ways to support your telecom needs. As I mentioned before, with voice integrity, that is a current beta program offered by our phone carrier that [00:09:00] we are going to be joining that beta program, building that into our API and offering that to you shortly.

We will always stay up to date on the ever-evolving telecom industry. I'm sure if any of you have been the recipient of my emails that I've sent over the past two years, you've noticed that the carriers have changed their requirements over and over and over again. So we stay up to date on all of those requirements. Make sure that you have what you need to stay on top of your deliverability needs.

So what do I need to get registered for the CINC Telecom package?

So we will need your legal business name and then everything attached to that legal business name. Your EIN, your business address, what type of business it is. And then also, if you want a custom caller ID, you would provide that in the form as well.

And I know a lot of folks don't necessarily have all this information on hand, so a good place to look for it would [00:10:00] be your most recent tax documents. You can also go to irs.gov and you can request a new EIN if you don't have one, or have them produce the one that you already have for you.

Jennifer O'Connell: So let's talk next steps, whether I'm a CINC client already, or maybe I'm looking into CINC. What are my next steps when it comes to this?

Danielle Garrett: Yeah, absolutely. So if you are a new client just joining us and you're still working with your sales representative, they will provide a form along with when you're gathering your brokerage information and all of that, so that you can give us this information that will give us a head start on getting your registration going before your site launches. So hopefully that can be ready to go, so you can start texting.

And then for existing clients, there's a link in the top right corner of your CINC platform under your profile. It's called the telecom registration link. So, if you have not registered, go there today and get that started. If at any point you need to make a change to your caller ID [00:11:00] name or something like that, you can also do that there. And any questions that existing clients have, they can go to our Talk & Text team. You can go to your account manager. Any of us would be happy to help, but we want to get these registrations in and make sure that all of our clients can still send as many texts as they need to be successful and all of their calls are successfully going through as well.

Jennifer O'Connell: So are you saying that by that September 1st deadline, whether they're a CINC client or not, that if their registration isn't complete, that their texts, for any agent, aren't being delivered?

Danielle Garrett: Absolutely. So it's not just CINC that's being impacted by this.

So any company, any other real estate platform, any other CRM that allows the sending of text messages, if your account is not registered by 9/1 of this year, phone carriers will block those messages from being sent.

In addition to blocking them, you will also [00:12:00] incur penalty charges just for attempting to send the message.

So they're really trying to drive this home to make sure that as many businesses register as possible.

Jennifer O'Connell: Got it. Yeah, I think that just speaks to the importance of having a partner that's going to look out for this for you.

Danielle Garrett: Absolutely.

Jennifer O'Connell: Great. Thank you so much.

Danielle Garrett: Thank you.