Registering a Number for Texts
A voice agent with its own phone number starts receiving texts the moment it has that number. Erdo keeps every one of them and honors opt-out from day one — nothing here is needed for that. Sending is different. US mobile carriers will not carry business texts from an ordinary ten-digit number unless the account behind it is registered under a programme called A2P 10DLC: the carriers want to know which real business is texting, and what it is texting about, before they will deliver anything. An unregistered number’s messages are simply refused. So a number can capture texts perfectly and still be unable to answer one. That is almost always the explanation when an agent looks silent on SMS. Registration is per organization, and it is Erdo that files it — you provide the business details and approve the request.What you fill in
Everything the carriers need is one form, at Settings → Business:
Entity type and legal structure look like one question asked twice, and they are not. Entity type is
whether the business is privately held, publicly traded, a non-profit and so on; legal structure is
its legal form, the one written on the tax record. Acme Holdings LLC is a private company and a
limited liability corporation, and the registry asks for both because it checks the second against
that record. An LLC declared as a corporation is not caught when you save it — it comes back days
later as a rejection, with the review fee already spent.
Only an organization admin can see or change this page.
Your tax ID is stored encrypted and is never shown again — the form displays only its last four
digits, and you re-enter it to change it. It is never returned by the API, never written to a log,
and never appears in a chat. Erdo’s agents have no way to write it, and will never ask you for it
in a conversation — they can only tell you which fields are still empty and point you here.
Registering the number
Once the profile is complete, press Register for SMS next to the number on the same page. Because registration costs money, it goes through an approval card like any other spend: you see the number, which agent answers on it, your organization, and the fees before you approve. Erdo pays those fees for you during the pilot — the card states them so nobody approves a charge blind. As of writing they are approximately 15 once for campaign review (not refunded if the review fails), and about $1.50 a month for the campaign. Twilio publishes the current figures. You can do the same thing from anywhere else you work:erdo_get_business_profile,
erdo_set_business_profile, erdo_voice_phone_number_list and
erdo_voice_phone_number_sms_provision. erdo_set_business_profile deliberately
cannot set the tax ID — an assistant filling that field in would put it in its own
conversation history — so use the settings page, the REST endpoint or the CLI for
that one field.
And in chat you can simply ask — “why isn’t my number replying to texts?” — and the agent will read
the registration state and tell you which fields are missing or what the carriers said.
What the states mean
Alongside the state you will see what it is waiting on — the business profile being reviewed,
the brand being verified, the campaign in carrier review — and, when something was rejected, the
reviewer’s own words for it, usually naming the exact field. A rejection also appears in your work
feed, so nobody has to be watching this page for it to be noticed.
Editing the profile after a number is approved does not reach the carriers on its own. The
registration holds the legal identity that was submitted, so renaming the business, moving the
registered address or changing the authorised representative leaves Erdo showing the new details
over a registration that still carries the old ones. Erdo notices within a day and says so: the
number is marked out of date with the fields that moved, and a work-feed item explains it. The
number keeps sending throughout — what is stale is what the registry knows about the business, not
the number’s permission to text. Re-sending it is your call rather than Erdo’s, because it re-opens
carrier review for days and is not something to trigger by editing a form: press Re-send the
business profile on the number, or run
erdo voice numbers provision-sms again. Nothing already
accepted is paid for twice.
Approved is checked rather than assumed. A registration can be withdrawn after it was granted —
the registry can suspend a business registration, or begin removing one, and the carriers stop
carrying its messages from that moment. Erdo re-asks about every approved number once a day, so a
registration that has been withdrawn moves to Failed with the reason and raises the same work-feed
item a rejection does, instead of the page going on saying the number can reply while every reply is
being refused.
When it is rejected
Fix the field the reviewer named at Settings → Business and press Register for SMS again. Registration resumes rather than starting over: whatever was already accepted stays accepted, and your corrected details are sent up to replace the ones that were rejected. If the rejection came before the business registration itself went in — which is most of them, and all the ones that name a field — the correction costs nothing extra. If the registration was rejected by the registry, it cannot be amended there and has to be filed again, which is a second registration fee; Erdo pays it during the pilot, and the card says so. The same is true one step further on: a campaign the carriers turn down cannot be amended either, so correcting the field they named files a new campaign and the review fee is charged again. That fee buys a submission rather than an outcome, and it is not refunded — which is why Erdo says so here rather than leaving it to appear on an invoice. Moving country is the one correction that is more than an edit. The carriers do not allow a registered address to change country, so Erdo files a new address and a new supporting document and detaches the old one. You do not have to do anything differently — change the address on the form and register again — but the registration goes back through review with the new address rather than carrying the old one forward. Re-pressing the button without changing anything sends nothing and costs nothing. There is nothing to correct, so the answer would be the same. The commonest rejections are worth knowing in advance:- The legal name does not match the tax ID. Use the name on the tax record, not the trading name.
- The website does not describe the business. A parked domain or a page that says nothing about what you do gets rejected.
- The representative cannot be reached. The email and phone have to belong to a real person at the business.