Twilio’s A2P 10DLC Phone Number Upgrade Flow
| April 2022
Background
Twilio is a cloud customer engagement platform that helps businesses build unique, personalized experiences for their customers. There are a vast majority of U.S. Twilio customers who use phone numbers to text their customers for business purposes. These Twilio customers need to register their numbers in a system called A2P 10DLC (Application to Person 10-digit long code) in order to be compliant with the U.S. phone carrier regulations and receive additional benefits. Twilio has created a registration process for their customers to validate if they are a legitimate business and will use messaging appropriately. We needed to design an upgrade flow where customers could increase their messaging rates with the carriers.
My Role
• Lead Product Designer
- Discovery research
- Design and prototyping
- Lead researcher
My Team
• Product Manager
• Supporting Product Designer
• 2 Engineers
Constraints
• Changing requirements
• Technical constraints
• Multiple stakeholders
Why are we doing it?
When Twilio customers buy a phone number, they have a daily maximum of messages that can be successfully delivered. If customers hit that daily maximum, any message that is sent after will not be delivered. We saw a gap in the user experience where the registration flow was only catered to a specific customer type and ignored the basic needs of Direct Starter customers. There wasn’t an existing way for these customers to upgrade their experience when their needs grow beyond their current package.
The Customer
Needs
• Easy onboarding to start texting
• Confirmation their messages are getting sent
• Sending messages in a compliant way
Pain Points
• Constantly hitting max daily message limit
• Want more messaging capabilities and features
• Compliance rules can be overwhelming
User testing
Details
• 5 participants over two weeks
• 45 minute sessions
• Tested with a clickable Figma prototype
What we wanted to test
• Validate or invalidate our research hypothesis
• User comprehension
• Terms and copy
• Overall improvements to the registration experience
Viewing error logs
Customer sees an alert that they have hit their daily message limit and need to register to send more messages
Customer is taken to the A2P registration home page
Customer creates a profile
Customer registers their Business
Customer registers why they are using messaging
Customer completes the registration flow
Customer's phone number is registered and upgraded and taken back to the A2P homepage
Solution
Our initial hypothesis was correct. Customers understood the fact they have hit a limitation and needed to upgrade their package to be unblocked. Testing proved that the upgrade flow was intuitive, easy to follow, and identify they successfully upgraded their package.
Alert moved to "Messaging overview" page
Added a "current package" state
Renamed step titles to simpler terms
Add confirmations at the end of each registration step
Improving access to documentation on this sub step
Improved current package "upgrade state"
Results
Shared with Key Stakeholders
Communicated the updates and changes to product and design leadership.
Engineering Handoff
Fully documented the major updates, how it affected all user types, and assisted in QA testing.
Created a Vision for Future Iterations
Collaborated with product to work set the framework for future upgrade workflows.