Overview

Regardless of where you are, when you send an SMS (or voice call) to an international destination, it will have to travel along predetermined routes. Many times, the SMS is sent via an indirect route, meaning the message may be transferred multiple times to get to its final destination, and ultimately the end-user. Even though a route is performing great, all these hops (usually other Telecom companies) become a potential point of failure. During long period of time, they might underperform on a certain destination due to unforeseen events or scheduled downtimes. Even if a company offers 99,9% uptime it still means that over a year they can still be down for 8 hours. If an SMS route has 3-4 hops (companies) you could still end up with few days when that destination (country) will underperform.

To help with these unforeseen events, we have developed a feature called Multiple Carrier Support.

What is Multiple Carrier Support?

Multiple Carrier Support is a feature developed by CheckMobi that enhances the SMS and Voice calling products offered.

How this works is that for each destination, at any point in time, CheckMobi has readily available two different routes (we call them providers) to handle your SMS and voice traffic. These routes are composed from multiple distinct Telecom companies, each of them with high uptime and reliable SMS and voice calling routes and with individual pricing. They are handpicked on each country based on performance and in case one of these carriers underperforms – even for a few hours, CheckMobi customers can easily switch from the web-console to use the backup carrier thus solving the issue directly without any temporary downtime.

Most companies chose to integrate at least two SMS solutions to have them as fallback in case one of them has issues, CheckMobi went the extra mile and did this for its customers.

What are the main benefits of Multiple Carrier Support?

The benefits that come with Multiple Carrier Support can be summed up into three aspects:

• Control: At any point in time, if there is an issue with SMS or calls failing on a specific destination, CheckMobi customers are in full control and can immediately switch to a working SMS company while opening a ticket for the faulty route.

• Auto-fallback using round-robin: Besides temporary downtimes, there might be the case where just one SMS or one voice call fails, afterward the route to continue performing well. For those isolated cases we've created a feature that relies on Multiple Carrier Support called: Round Robin. When this is enabled, every time an SMS (or voice call) fails and one of your users requests a second SMS (a second verification code), for the same destination number, in a 5-minute interval, then the second SMS will use the fallback carrier. Simply put, if your users retry the SMS verification, CheckMobi will make sure it is delivered, by using our backup carrier to send it. In case none of our dedicated carriers for that destination manage to send the SMS, most probably no other platform could send it. It is an indication that there is a general issue with that country (destination).

• Increased success rate: All these use cases of Multiple Carrier Support converge to one thing: increased success rate in verifying tour customers and delivering your message to them.

How do I set it up?

In the CheckMobi web console, under the Settings section, go on your active application and select the SMS tab. You will find a section called: Primary SMS provider. This is where the Multiple Carrier Support configuration takes place. From here you can do two things:

1. Set your default primary SMS provider to use for your entire traffic - You can choose between Standard and Premium provider. These are the pseudonyms for the two different set of carriers we have set for each destination. The quality between the two is similar and continuously monitored by us, what differs is the rates for sending SMS – usually Premium is a bit more expensive because it's using lot of Tier 1 Carriers while Standard includes more High Quality Routes with decent prices, that is why we strongly recommend choosing Standard and only switching to Premium in the rare cases that Standard underperforms.

To see the rates provided by Standard and Premium for each country or destination go to our pricing page.

Another particularity of this feature is that you can choose Standard as the default primary SMS provider for all destinations, but then go and select Premium only for one country – this is useful in case Standard performs great on all destinations but one – so you only need to switch to Premium that underperforming destination.

2. Enable Round Robin – when activated, the second SMS sent to the same number in a period of 5 minutes (this usually happens when a customer retries to verify his number in case the SMS did not arrive) will be delivered using the backup carrier – for example, if you have Standard as default then the second SMS to the same number will use Premium this time around.

Conclusion

SMS is used in very important steps in your customer’s journey such as customer verification, sensitive action confirmation or important messages that need to be sent, unfortunately it is also a highly volatile environment where even the best routes (direct routes) have issues or downtimes for few minutes.

We, at CheckMobi, understand that every SMS that is not delivered could result in a customer loss that is why we strive to enhance our SMS products with features such as Multiple Carrier Support, resulting in a high success rate.