Delivery receipts

What are delivery receipts?

Amazingly enough they're basically what they sound they're like, their a receipt back to advise if your message has been delivered.

Are all delivery receipts equal?

They should be, but it can be a matter or interpretation and here's what I mean - typically when a SMS provider sends a message through to a network, they should get an initial receipt which advises whether the message has been accepted or not, from there on a successfully delivered message should come a second delivery receipt to advise that the message has been successfully sent to the handset (mobile phone).

With us, we typically use a "sent" status to advise that the relevant network has accepted the message and will forward it on to the phone, and then a "delivered" status to say that the phone has received the message.

Other typical status' generally for SMS might be "failed" or "expired" - failed is when the network rejects the message, the number might be wrong or disconnected. Then expired is when the network has attempted to reach the handset but has time out - if could be the phone was been switched off, out of reach from the network or overseas without international roaming.

Now these are our status' - not all providers use the same terms, some might say received instead of delivered or my favourite "read", to that end they're just words and let me assure you that there is nothing within the protocols for SMS that allow you to know if someone has read the message or not, just to know whether the phone has received it.

Why is it important?

It's important to use a provider that offers delivery receipts on all messages, otherwise how do you know the message has been received? i look at delivery receipts like registered post - if I need to get something across to someone else, then I trust the delivery receipts to back up my claims that in fact the information was delivered, in the same way a solicitor will use registered post to say person x received their letter.

The cost of the message is never the face value of the SMS, but in value of the information, or the actions that person x, y or z was going to do with it. So if you only receive receipts on 90% of your messages, then who knows what the 10% are getting, and how that might impact on your business.

Of course value is an individual thing, and what one person places a given value on something might differ from the next persons valuation - and that's something that is down to you. the basic up shot is that without delivery receipts, you don't know what's going on and you should ask yourself how is that effecting your business.


Thanks and enjoy.

Cheers,
C