We will be trialing a new SMS partner during the coming weeks.  C9's technical systems have now been modified so it can route SMS to two different providers. We will run them head to head and measure performance of them both.  There have been some lingering concerns that reliability of SMS delivery for our existing provider is not where it should be. This trial will allow us to see if this is indeed the case and if we can improve upon reliability.

It is expected that a percentage of SMS messages will fail : because of wrong/invalid number.  Also it is expected at a percentage of SMS will not be receipted because although the number is valid the phone is switched off or out of service range for an extended duration.  The figures for our deliveries in past 12 months seems typical for delivery rates, though it never hurts to try and improve.

month	success %	fail %	unknown %
2013-12-01	93.76	3.74	2.50
2013-11-01	97.69	1.47	0.84
2013-10-01	96.65	2.22	1.13
2013-09-01	95.25	4.15	0.60
2013-08-01	96.21	1.69	2.11
2013-07-01	96.12	1.99	1.89
2013-06-01	97.67	1.70	0.62
2013-05-01	96.57	2.65	0.78
2013-04-01	96.20	2.44	1.36
2013-03-01	91.62	6.42	1.96
2013-02-01	93.70	5.27	1.02
2013-01-01	96.07	2.03	1.90

 

Figures around 96/97% seem fairly typical based on my prior professional experience in mobile telephony.  December is low possibly because lots of dealers did SMS based compaigns to their customer database.  Campaigns are expected to to yield lower success rates compared to say workshop service/parts order notifications as you'd expect the quality/accuracy of your phone number database for active customers waiting for notification to be much higher than a database that include old customer contact details.

Also 2013 figures are quite good compared to previous years figures suggesting that our existing SMS provider has made steady improvements to their infrastructure, particularly with unreceipted messages. We also made changes to our own systems to more thoroughly search for delivery receipts for messages which have not been properly receipted to help bring unknown % rate down.

year	success %	fail %	unknown %
2013	95.43	3.22	1.34
2012	93.58	4.01	2.42
2011	92.92	3.18	3.90
2010	94.83	0.92	4.25

 

Still we will try and see if a new provider improves things for us and work with the best.  We can now retain two different providers for redundancy.

Note that c9 only bills for successful SMS deliveries. A successful SMS is an SMS that is receipted by the mobile phone. A receipt is a signal/notification sent from the mobile handset back to us where the phone acknowledges receipt of the SMS. It is possible that a handset will receive an SMS correctly but the receipt does not make it back to us.  For these SMS's  c9 errs on the assumption the phone did not receive the SMS and dealers are not billed for these.