10DLC, Simplified: What It Is and Why Your Texts Need It
If you've ever tried to turn on texting for your business and hit a wall of acronyms instead, you're not alone. 10DLC is probably the single most confusing gate in Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center setup, and I don't think that's because it's actually complicated. It's because nobody explains it before you're already stuck in it. So let's back up and do that first.
It's not a Zoom rule. It's a carrier rule.
10DLC stands for 10-Digit Long Code, which is just industry shorthand for a regular business phone number being used to send text messages. U.S. and Canadian mobile carriers require any business sending that kind of texting, what the industry calls A2P, application-to-person, to register first. They want to know who's texting, why, and how that business got permission to text you in the first place.
Zoom didn't invent this requirement and can't waive it. What Zoom built is the registration flow inside your account, so you're not filing this directly with a carrier yourself. As of February 2025, it's mandatory: every number sending SMS or MMS through Zoom Phone, Zoom Contact Center, or Zoom Meetings has to sit on an approved campaign, or texting on that number stops working.
Three steps, done in order
The process has a strict sequence, and skipping ahead is the most common way people waste a week.
First, you register a brand. This is your company's identity: legal name, address, tax ID, that kind of thing. It's a short form and usually clears in an hour or two.
Second, once the brand is approved, you create a campaign. This is where you describe how your business actually uses texting: who sends messages, who receives them, what they say, and how people agreed to get them in the first place. This step is where almost all the friction lives, and I'll get to why below.
Third, once the campaign is approved, you assign your phone numbers to it. Only then can those numbers send and receive SMS or MMS.
You cannot create a campaign before the brand is approved, and you cannot assign numbers before the campaign is approved. Each step gates the next.
Plan for four weeks, not four days
Brand approval is fast, often same-day. Campaign approval is the slow part: Zoom's own guidance is one to two weeks because campaigns queue up for review with the carriers themselves, not just with Zoom. Add it up, and Zoom tells customers to plan for a minimum of four weeks end to end. If you need more than 49 numbers on one campaign, that's a separate request on top of the campaign approval, and it can take up to four weeks on its own.
None of this is something Zoom can expedite on request. The fix isn't urgency, it's timing. If texting is part of a launch, a migration, or a new location going live, start the brand and campaign steps the day you know that date, not the week before.
Why campaigns get rejected
Carriers often reject campaigns for the same handful of reasons, over and over, and many of them are avoidable if you know to look for it before you submit:
The campaign description is vague. "We text our customers" isn't enough. Carriers want specifics: who's sending, who's receiving, what the messages contain, and roughly how often.
The consent story doesn't hold up. You have to say how people agreed to be texted, whether that's a checkbox on your website, a verbal ask on a call, or a written form, and your website's privacy policy has to back that up. If your privacy policy talks about sharing customer data with third parties, it needs a clear carve-out saying phone numbers and texting consent specifically aren't shared. That's a legal document, so if your privacy policy needs an edit, loop in whoever owns it early rather than at submission time.
The sample messages are missing required language. Every sample has to include your business name and end with something like "Reply STOP to cancel." Leave that out and the whole campaign bounces.
None of this is Zoom being strict for no reason. It's what the carriers are checking for on the other end, and Zoom's registration wizard will walk you through each piece if you follow it in order rather than skimming past it.
What happens if you skip it
On Zoom Phone and Zoom Meetings, a number without an approved campaign simply can't send or receive texts. On Zoom Contact Center, it's a little more visible: inbound texts to an unregistered number get auto-closed rather than routed to a queue, logged as a specific event so admins can see exactly how many messages never reached anyone. Worth checking that log if texting volume looks lower than expected and nobody's mentioned a rejected campaign.
It's also worth knowing this blocks more than plain texting. Features like Team SMS Thread Summary with AI only work once a number can send and receive SMS at all, so an unapproved campaign quietly blocks AI adoption too, not just the texting itself.
What I'd do this week
If you're texting today, or planning to soon, check your campaign status before anything else. If it's not submitted yet, start the brand registration this week. It's the fastest step, and it unblocks everything after it.
If a campaign was rejected, don't just resubmit the same form. Pull up the rejection reason — most of the time it's the description, the consent detail, or the sample message language — and fix that one thing specifically.
And if your business's privacy policy doesn't yet carve out texting consent from third-party data sharing, flag that to whomever owns your website now. That single sentence is a common last-mile blocker, and it's not something Zoom or I can fix on your behalf.
Where to go next
Zoom's own 10DLC compliance guide and 10DLC campaign checklist walk through every field in the registration wizard. If a campaign comes back rejected, Zoom's 10DLC rejections and solutions article lists the common causes and how to fix each one.
One last thing, since it comes up: nothing here is legal advice. The consent language and privacy policy wording are legal questions for your own counsel to sign off on. What I can tell you is what the carriers and Zoom are checking for, so you're not finding out for the first time when a campaign gets bounced.
For additional technical insights tailored to IT admins and decision makers, visit the Zoom Technical Library.
Written by Matthew Baker, Product Adoption Expert, Zoom Contact Center & Zoom Phone. For questions about this article or other Zoom Products, reach out via the Zoom Community or your Customer Success team.