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SMS Surveys

SMS Surveys is a great tool to reach everyone on the fly because peoples email inboxes are often flodded with promotions, other surveys and. Surveys delivered by SMS can be branded but not directly replied to, only through a link however this have some restrictions.

Branding on SMS

branding your sender names on SMS comes with a set of restrictions. This feature is called "Alphanumerinc Sender ID's" An Alphanumeric Sender ID is usually your company or brand name, but it is only allowed to have up to 11 characters, a-z, A-Z, 0-9. By experience we can see that you should stay within 3-11 characters as iPhones for example does not accept shorter senders than 3.

Note that these restrictions are not set by us, but by the GSM phone standard, so the length and usable characters are technological limitations not our choise. Furthermore it allowed in some countries while banned in others, and some require pre-registration. For more exact information on what is possible we refere.

Your own phonenumber

We can unfortunately not use any of your existing phone numbers as of now. But upon request, we can offer to host a new number for you through our providers Twilio og LinkMobility. This number are then unique to you so you can include it in your documentation and legal documents, and modify your websites accordingly to make the number searchable so people can associate it with your business.

Localized Support

As we are not a telecommunications compoany we would like to refere to someone that knows a bit more about the tele sector and features. Some countries does not support alphanumeric senders at all, some only allow charity, others require preregistration some with a cost, some free. Please refere to the details in the links below.

Twilio - Alphanumeric sender support

Security and Restrictions

Alphanumeric senders is a quite old, and quite open standard. This means that if you want to, you can send messages in the name of banks, governments, or other official institutions. To avoid fraudulent usage of our service we therefore do not allow you to verify your own sender names, please contact us on support@npstoday.com if you wish to add an alphanumeric sender to your account. Some country has specific restrictions listed on the link below.

SMS.to - Regulations and requirements by country

We provide SMS Surveys through two different providers. LinkMobility for our European customers and Twilio for American and International customers You can find the two providers individual description of restrictions on the links below

Twilio - Alphanumeric Sender Id

LinkMobility - Rest API docs (see page 8)

Deliverability

Although by far the most of our SMS surveys are delivered sucessfully, some of them we simply just can't verify. The GSM and Phonenumber standards are old, and therefore comes with some oddities that we can not explain ourselves. The best you can do to improve deliverability is to ensure that the phonenumbers you provide to us are as correct as possible and follow the E.164 standard. E.164 numbers are formatted [+] [country code] [subscriber number including area code] or for example +45 12345678 for DK or +1 415 1234567 for US.

The following is a few examples of scenarios that may occour that we can not nessecarily explain.

  • We can't guarantee delivery if the respondents phone has been turned off for more than 24 hours
  • We do not always get a correct delivery status as some phones and carriers handle this differently. For example a landline phone can not recieve a survey by sms, but it may not identify as a landline in the data we get from the carriers network.
  • Messages may be throttled by network carriers without notification depending on volume, content and country of operation. This can sometimes be fixed by registrering the message with a provider or altering its content a bit.
  • Surveys send to phonenumbers that does not comply with the E.164 standard may not be delivered as a countrycode is not available, if you only send surveys to a single country, this is however rarely a problem, but we suggest you always use the E.164 standard anyways.