Why SMS goes missing
In this article: ► Practices in the industry that vary wildly in quality ► A provider’s ability to handle stability and scalability ► Why a 100% submission guarantee should be part of the service commitment
Have you ever registered for a service online, been told an SMS would arrive so you could complete the process, waited and waited, and received nothing at all — so the registration was never completed?
And if you are the merchant, you may have run into a provider unable to give you any official data at all, or noticed that some SMS simply vanished, leaving you unable to evaluate how a project or campaign performed.
Because an SMS went missing, you receive a complaint from a valuable customer and your reputation takes a hit. Both sides lose.
There are several causes. Broadly, either the industry contains some deliberately dishonest practices, or a poor sending method is being used.
Major brands regularly tell us that their previous provider lost SMS from time to time, and every time they asked, the answer was “it was sent”. In practice, verification requires at minimum a log from a major telco — without one you cannot establish that the message was ever submitted to the carrier for sending. Because every SMS matters to the customer, our most basic service commitment is this: if a client submits 10,000 messages to send, we submit all 10,000 to the carrier. In other words, we honestly provide a 100% submission guarantee.
Another cause is that some providers, to cut costs, send using nothing more than ordinary SIM cards — and you can be almost certain that this process is nowhere near as reliable as sending directly through the telco. Which means your messages may well never have reached your target customers at all. In an era when many brands and even government bodies use SMS to deliver important and time-critical information — OTP above all — it is not enough to send: the timing matters, and SIM cards cannot reach that service level.
So what else should merchants of every size watch for when choosing an SMS provider?
The infrastructure must meet high security and stability standards The provider’s sending system must avoid a single point of failure, which means the provider is not over-dependent on one server such that a hardware problem stops your business sending. The provider should also supply a valid HTTPS certificate so messages are encrypted and the attack surface is reduced.
The ability to transmit large volumes at speed To help a business send large volumes simultaneously, the technical requirement for delivering within 5 seconds versus within 30 seconds is worlds apart, and the sophistication of the provider’s sending system is decisive. Providers frequently underestimate what handling large volumes actually involves and deploy a low-end sending system, leaving the vast majority of messages sitting idle or going out much later — and sometimes dropping API send requests outright because the server is too busy, which leaves the target audience unhappy.
The service commitment Platform stability is only the baseline. What matters more is how the provider arranges routing and whether it connects directly to the telco. Whether the provider will commit that every send instruction you submit is submitted onward to the carrier matters enormously too — banks, securities firms and other industries sending OTP generally require a service level agreement. It is also worth asking whether your provider can offer a 100% submission guarantee.
If time-critical messages — login passwords, discount codes — fail to arrive within the expected window, your customers become dissatisfied, lose confidence in your brand, and may generate a volume of complaints with substantial negative impact.
A reliable SMS platform, then, is of considerable importance to the competitiveness and reputation of brands and of public and private sector organisations alike.