You set up the automation, the texts "sent" — and customers never got them. The contractor's troubleshooting guide: check these seven things in order, and you'll find the culprit in 20 minutes.
System 1 from the Leveraged Owner Starter Pack
You set up missed-call text-back last week. The dashboard says "sent." But a customer just told you they never got your text — and another one replied to a message from three days ago that you never saw. Your automation is running. Your texts are dying somewhere between your tool and their phone. Here's how to find out where.
This is part of Pillar A: Capture Every Lead — the troubleshooting companion to the complete missed-call text-back setup guide. Work through these in order; they're ranked by how often each one is the actual culprit.
If you turned on texting before your 10DLC business-texting registration was approved — "A2P" is application-to-person messaging, and 10DLC is the carriers' registration system for business texts from standard 10-digit numbers — your texts are being filtered as unregistered traffic. This is the single most common cause of "texts aren't delivering," full stop.
Carriers filter automated business texts that don't include opt-out instructions. Your first automated text to any contact must include something like "Reply STOP to opt out."
TCPA (federal telemarketing law) quiet hours prohibit marketing texts before 8am and after 9pm in the recipient's local time. Carriers and tools increasingly enforce this automatically — texts scheduled for 6am "go out" and never arrive.
Even registered numbers get filtered when message content trips carrier spam filters. The usual triggers:
Fix: rewrite the message in plain, conversational language — the way you'd actually text a customer. If it reads like a human wrote it, it usually passes. If it reads like a coupon circular, it won't.
If your number has been reported as spam — even a few times — carriers throttle or filter your texts. This happens most often when businesses text old lists, bought lists, or people who never asked to hear from them.
Some setups send texts from a different number than the one customers call — a pool number, a short code, or a newly provisioned line. The customer gets a text from a number they don't recognize and ignores it (or their phone flags it as spam).
Sometimes it's not you. The customer's carrier may filter, their phone may sort unknown numbers to spam, or they may have texting disabled on a landline-forwarded number.
When texts aren't delivering, run this in order and stop at the first failure:
Nine times out of ten, the answer is step 1. The registration is the foundation everything else sits on — which is why every setup guide in this series puts it first.
This whole post is about staying on the right side of the system: 10DLC business-texting registration (1–7 day approval, ~$15–$20 in carrier/campaign fees) before sending, opt-out language in automated texts, TCPA quiet hours (no marketing texts before 8am / after 9pm recipient local time), and instant STOP handling. General information, not legal advice. For the full registration walkthrough, read the 10DLC registration guide.
Start with the complete missed-call text-back guide (Pillar A), then the 10DLC registration walkthrough to fix the #1 culprit properly. For the legal boundaries, read TCPA quiet hours explained.
The full setup guide, all four copy-paste scripts (including the owner notification), the "Your Numbers" missed-call worksheet, and the step-by-step setup guide — free, no catch. Fix your missed calls this week.
See everything inside the AI Automation Starter Pack ($27, one-time) here: https://leveragedowner.com/starter-pack/
This post is System 1 from the Leveraged Owner Starter Pack — the done-for-you version with the full 11-step setup guide, the deliverability checklist, every script, and complete setup guides for all 8 systems.
No industry statistics were used in this post. Pricing figures are approximate and change — verify before purchasing.
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Twilio vs. Telnyx vs. SignalWire for contractor business texting: per-message pricing, 10DLC registration support, and setup difficulty compared honestly.
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