Troubleshooting and Resubmitting US A2P Brands

To register in the new US 10DLC ecosystem, companies must first create a record of their business called an A2P Brand. Information from this submission, including business name, tax identifier, and more is used to vet your business using various business verification sources.

US A2P Brands can fail for a number of reasons. This guide will cover:

• Common errors and how to troubleshoot them
• How to resubmit your A2P Brands using the Console or API

Let's get started!

Common errors and troubleshooting

When you use the a2p/BrandRegistrations endpoint to create a US A2P Brand, you'll get back many parameters relevant to your new brand, but some are specifically related to brand failures.

The brand_feedback field is returned in the response when status is FAILED. This field contains a list of Feedback IDs, where each ID corresponds to a recommendation on how you can improve your brand score.

Below are a list of possible feedback IDs that can be returned and corresponding recommendations for fixing the required brand information:

For more information on how Brand approval works and best practices to get your brand approved, please see the A2P 10DLC Brand Approval Best Practices support article.

Resubmitting your Brands

Twilio supports resubmission of Brands in the unverified state up to three times for free using either the Twilio Console or the Twilio A2P 10DLC API.

Using the Console

When a Brand registration fails within the Console, here’s what you can expect to see in your process to resubmit the Brand with correct information:

When submitted using the Twilio Console, Brands will show descriptive error messages. From here, you can click "Edit customer profile" to begin the process of editing and correcting your Brand information.

Using the API

Brands are the summation of many reusable Trust Hub components including Customer/Business Profiles and US A2P Profiles. Depending on what needs to be updated, you will need to update the underlying profile or end user in order to resubmit a Brand.

Let's look at an example. We have created a Brand with the following bits and pieces:

To create a Brand, you first create each one of the objects above as Twilio resources. Then, you roll them up into "Profiles". Together, a Business Profile plus a Messaging Profile equals one US A2P Brand.

When things go wrong with a Brand, editing the information means you must edit the underlying object. For example, if the address input was incorrect you'll need to go back and edit the Address object.

Testing out errors with Brand creation

Here, examine creating a Brand with an error as a demonstration. Instead of putting the correct EIN within the customer_profile_business_information EndUser, we just put "123456789". Let’s see what comes back in the Brand creation:

Request to create this US A2P Brand:

curl -X POST https://messaging.twilio.com/v1/a2p/BrandRegistrations \
--data-urlencode "CustomerProfileBundleSid=BUb4784f724e5b12f319296cf6fc521eeb" \
--data-urlencode "A2PProfileBundleSid=BUced9020cecf2910329dcab95938d7237" \
-u $DEC8_SID:$DEC8_TKN | json_pp

Reading the Brand's failure state:

The response won't immediately have anything useful since creating a Brand is an asynchronous process. Making GET requests to the Brand until we see a failure reason shows us the following response:

{
   ...
   "brand_feedback" : [
      "TAX_ID"
   ],
   ...
   "status" : "FAILED",
   ...
}

Cutting out much of the response, the two key parameters we're looking for are brand_feedback and status. We can see from the brand_feedback parameter that TAX_ID is the issue. Looking at our glossary above, this means a mismatch between the entered tax identification number with the business information. That does not necessarily mean that the tax ID itself is wrong; instead, it could mean that the business name does not match.

At this point you should verify the business name, address, and tax ID to make sure that they all match. To verify this you could ask your customer, or use a service like TIN check (not an official Twilio partner, but we've heard it's useful!).

Let's say it's determined that the tax ID was the issue. To fix it we'll have to update the customer_profile_business_information EndUser object. Read more about updating EndUser objects in the TrustHub API documentation.

Update the EndUser’s tax ID attribute:

ATTRIBUTES=$(cat << EOF
{
    "business_registration_number": "352618029"
}
EOF
)

curl -X POST https://trusthub.twilio.com/v1/EndUsers/IT23cc13be25ae2f56a240f7745ecbd5f4 \
--data-urlencode "Attributes=$ATTRIBUTES" \
-u $DEC8_SID:$DEC8_TKN | json_pp

Once you've finished making edits, it is essential to place your Business Profile and A2P Profile back into review state. Brand resubmission cannot proceed without this.

Request to resubmit the Secondary Business Profile to review state:

curl -X POST https://trusthub.twilio.com/v1/CustomerProfiles/BUb4784f724e5b12f319296cf6fc521eeb \
--data-urlencode "Status=pending-review" \
-u $DEC8_SID:$DEC8_TKN | json_pp

Request to resubmit the A2P Messaging Profile to review state:

curl -X POST https://trusthub.twilio.com/v1/CustomerProfiles/BUced9020cecf2910329dcab95938d7237 \
--data-urlencode "Status=pending-review" \
-u $DEC8_SID:$DEC8_TKN | json_pp

With the profile updated to have the correct EIN, you can make an empty POST request to the original Brand to have it resubmitted.

Request:

curl -X POST https://messaging.twilio.com/v1/a2p/BrandRegistrations/BN1acce9e78c899aa0127200e00cd5cca7 \
-u $DEC8_SID:$DEC8_TKN | json_pp

The response to this request kicks off an asynchronous process to re-register. Note that the response will tell you the status is FAILED because at that moment in time it is true. Wait a few minutes and check with a GET request until you have a status of APPROVED. That's it!

Editing brands allows you to correct information without having to incur extra fees and clutter your Twilio account.