How to enable SMS delivery
Adding SMS sender name
Adding a SMS sender name requires, that the name is authorized by nps.today.
You need to contact [email protected] to have an SMS sender name authorized. Please provide your organization and the exact name of the sender name you will like us to authorize.
Sender name restrictions
- Can only contain a-z, A-Z, 0-9
- Maximum of 11 characters - From experience, we see that you should stay within 3-11 characters as iPhones, for instance, does not accept shorter senders than 3
These restrictions are set by the GSM phone standard, so all restrictions are technological limitations, not nps.today standars.
Click here to find more information about using SMS surveys.
See below where you find your authorized sender name(s)
Adding an SMS text
When writing your SMS text, the text must contain {LINK}. Place this in the text where you want the respondent to click the link to the survey.
Be aware of character limits and SMS costs
Phone carriers measure SMS texts in batches called Segments. Your message length and the characters you choose directly determine how many segments your message uses and how you are billed.
Adding just one special character or emoji changes the encoding for the entire message. This instantly drops your character limit per segment.
Segment Comparison Guide
| Message Length | Standard Text Only (GSM-7 Encoding) |
With Special Characters / Emojis (UCS-2 Encoding) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Segment | 1 – 160 characters | 1 – 70 characters |
| 2 Segments | 161 – 306 characters | 71 – 134 characters |
| 3 Segments | 307 – 459 characters | 135 – 201 characters |
| 4 Segments | 460 – 612 characters | 202 – 268 characters |
Standard Text
- What it is: Standard English letters (A-Z, a-z), numbers (0-9), and basic punctuation (e.g.,
!,?,@,$). - Multi-segment rule: Messages over 160 characters are split into chunks of 153 characters (7 characters are used behind the scenes to stitch the parts together).
- GSM-7 (Standard Encoding): This data format uses 7 bits of data per character. It is highly optimized for mobile networks but only supports a restricted list of 128 basic characters. Because the data size per character is small, you fit more text into a single segment.
Special Characters & Emojis
- What they are: Emojis (👋), accented letters (é, å), non-Latin scripts, or "smart quotes" (
“’) copied from Word/Google Docs. - Multi-segment rule: Messages over 70 characters are split into chunks of 67 characters (3 characters are used to stitch the parts together).
- UCS-2 (Unicode Encoding): This data format uses 16 bits (2 bytes) of data per character to support complex symbols, emojis, and global alphabets. Because each character takes up more than double the data space of standard text, the capacity of an SMS segment is slashed by more than half.
- Adding just one character that requires UCS-2 encoding upgrades the entire message to Unicode, immediately dropping your character limits.
Character / Segment Counter
Notice the segment counter under the SMS text field to help you monitor your counts in real-time:
Characters left / Segments used