TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) released a regulation in 2018 to implement the registration of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in order to enhance control over fraudulent activities and to prevent customers from Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC). You can read all about DLT and about its advantages here.
Now, as part of their Phase-3 implementation, TRAI introduced another regulation. Before this, any organization wanting to connect with customers through SMS has to
– Get their KYC done
– Get their Sender ID approved and linked to the registered companies.
In addition to this, from March 2021, you also have to get your SMS content template registered that you want to send to your customer. The term is known as “Consent Template Registration” which is defined as a distributed ledger for registration of consent template (DL-TCS) that keeps a record of unique consent template identity along with the content of template and details of the sender who got it registered, in a secured manner.
There are 4 different types of content types depending on, which way you want to communicate with your customers.
Transactional SMS- Any message which contains OTP (mainly banking transactions) and requires to complete transaction initiated by the customer.
Promotional SMS- Message sent to promote any goods or services is said to be promotional in nature. These messages are sent to customers based on their preferences.
Service Explicit- Promotional offer messages sent to customers after receiving their consent will come under this category.
Service Implicit- Any message that is sent based on a customer’s action or his existing relationship with the entity, that is not promotional is considered as service implicit.
You can get any telemarketer to register it for you or you can register it yourself.
Before going ahead to register your template, take notes of these things.
– While creating the content of the template, it is mandatory to mention the brand name in the content field.
– The brand name can be in any form- Business name, brand name, trademark.
– To create a template in the regional language, use the “copy/paste message” option
– Never manually modify the variable once entered in the message box, it will not be considered a variable anymore.
Apart from all these, there will still be a question on how to register your SMS template. Refer to these steps to get your SMS template successfully registered.
