Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued important guidelines under Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018 (TCCCPR 2018) with respect to the sending of commercial communication using telecom resources through Voice Calls or SMS to prevent Unsolicited Commercial Communications (UCC). The senders of commercial communications such as banks, insurance companies, stockbrokers, SMEs or any other entity have to abide by the regulatory requirements which are prescribed by TRAI.

Some of the important regulatory requirements are as follows-

1. Registration on DLT Platform –

• It is compulsory to get registration with any of the Telecom Services Providers on DLT Platform under TCCCPR-2018 Regulations for sending any commercial communications, whether through voice calls or messages.
• The senders shall use only ’140/160’ numbering series while making any commercial calls. ‘140’ is allocated for making promotional voice calls only. ‘160’ series is allocated to the senders for doing transactional and service calls to their on-going customers.
• It is mandatory for the senders to register their SMS headers for sending SMS messages to their existing customers.
• Registration of content templates with the Telecom Service Providers is also compulsory.
• It is to be ensured by the senders that the commercial communications are done through Registered Telemarketers or by creating a direct connectivity with the Telecom Service Provider to meet the purpose.

2. Digital Consent Acquisition (DCA) shall be used for getting the digital consents of the customers to whom the commercial communications are to be made.
3. It is the responsibility of the Senders to maintain the confidentiality and the privacy of the information/data of their customers.
4. Proper and sufficient measures are required to be taken to ensure that the headers and templates are not being misused. They need to be reviewed or reverified on a timely basis to avoid any chance of misuse.
5. Strict provisions are there to regulate the violation or misuse of any header or template. Such misuse may lead to the temporary suspension of the Sender.
6. It is the responsibility of the sender to create awareness among the customers in the locally understood language about the possible remedial actions or steps in the various situations such as DND Registration, which means blocking all or some commercial communications according to their preference, registration of the customer’s complaints in case of any receiving spams despite of registering as DND, receiving suspected fraud communication or fraud or cyber-crime already happened.
7. The guidelines are being issued for the benefit of the Entities only. It may lead to better customer service and satisfaction.

So, registration under DLT is a compulsory requirement introduced by TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) for those entities who wishes to send any form of commercial communication, whether in the form of SMS, E-mails, etc. This technology would ultimately assist in reducing the number of spam and would improve the telecom subscriber satisfaction.

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LLM Manisha Bagaria