When you are setting up an SMS business, whether it’s an SMS aggregator or SMS provider, it’s important to ensure high-quality services. Usually, it means using the quality, white routes that consequently provide high SMS delivery rates.
In this article, Testelium shares the main reasons why you should pay attention to a regular SMS supplier check and invest in the SMS test solution.
Why is a reliable messaging route so important?
SMS route is basically a path your SMS goes through to reach the end-point receiver. Before being processed by the carrier, your message may encounter the other SMS aggregators and providers in the link, and some of them may leverage unreliable, inefficient routes with bad performance.
Grey routes are semi-legal routes in which the messages travel partially through unauthorized mediums. You may experience a drop in delivery rates and instead of stable percents, you will have an unusually low number of delivered messages.
Another threat of unreliable routes is fake SMS delivery reports. Fake DLR comes when you receive a confirmation that your messages were processed and sent successfully, but in reality, the receivers have never seen it. Fake SMS delivery status devalues the A2P messaging and provides unrealistic and untrustworthy statistics.
As a result, grey routes may and fake delivery reports may lead you to low quality of the services you provide to your customers. If the clients’ messages are regularly not delivered or your analytics shows a high percentage of deliveries, but the client doesn’t see any outcomes even from their most powerful SMS text marketing ideas, you will definitely feel significant damage to your reputation.
At the same time, adequate scaling won’t be possible. If you want to induce the volumes of your SMS sent, you need to ensure that the characteristics of the routes in use will be able to accommodate this need. However, if the chosen route performs badly, there is no sense to use it at all.
Why are some SMS suppliers unreliable?
The grey routes bring a lot of issues for the whole industry. According to the MEF and Mobilesquared report, the mobile network operators are going to lose around a whopping 50 billion dollars due to grey routes between 2018-2023.
It happens because some SMS providers don’t sign or disregard the AA.19/AA.60 agreement that defines the terms of international SMS hubbing services.
These violations happen as SMS providers plan to hide their revenues on A2P traffic from mobile carriers, but still, charge their clients for every message sent.
Fraudulent methods and workarounds lead to the implementation of routes with questionable qualities, modified message content, and sender IDs.
The scheme with fake DLRs is also built on enhanced profits: you are paying full price for bulk SMS delivery, while the vendor makes no efforts to send and deliver them.
How Testelium helps to identify good SMS vendors’ routes
So, how can any SMS business fight fraudsters and protect their revenues and results from being manipulated?
The main step is to detect and block corrupted partners who take advantage of your traffic. Here Testelium’s services can give you a hand and provide you with end-to-end SMS testing.
We provide quick and easy SMS route testing on real numbers of mobile users situated all over the world. you want to run an SMS simulation, analyze your existing routes, or evaluate the routes given by a new vendor, Testelium is the right tool to implement into your digital ecosystem.
Our SMS testing platform features give you access to real insights and performance of the route you use and shows:
— what SMS centers the messages go through;
— how much time it takes to deliver a message to the recipients;
— if the message is successfully delivered or not;
— if the content of the messages were changed while being processed;
— if the sender ID was displayed the same an s in the initial message.
With these parameters and other detailed analytics provided by the platform, you will be able to detect fake delivery reports, understand the characteristics of the routes and choose the most efficient for your SMS sending needs.
We also have an SMS delivery testing API with easy and convenient integrations that will help you collect all the info on your SMS business in one portal.
Summing up
When your SMS business is growing, the quality of the routes becomes even more significant. On small volumes, some issues might be undetected or make zero difference for your clients. However, while scaling, you may need to fight for higher delivery rates and routes with higher performance and quality.
Implementing an SMS testing tool like Testelium will help you go through this process and filter out unreliable vendors, and hence, become a better services provider.
