Why are SMS messages not delivered to a contact's phone?

When interacting with your target audience via mobile communications through surveys and quizzes, notice or inbox conversations: ultimately the goal is for an SMS message to get delivered, and for contacts to respond to the SMS message in order to have smooth two conversations via SMS.

Sometimes, these SMS messages do not reach the contact’s phone or handset. This could be a result of various reasons, which are:

Contacts did not receive the survey, quiz or notice

The platform may have not sent out the invite to survey/quiz or notice message. When pushing out survey and quiz invites: sometimes these invites don’t go out to contacts or less than expected.

Recommendation

1. Troubleshoot your contacts, survey, quiz or notice. Here’s a detailed FAQ article on why contacts did not receive survey invites or notice sends.
   

No network coverage

The contact is an area of poor network coverage or connectivity. This will result in an SMS failed delivery status.

Recommendation

1. Advise your contacts to move to an area with better mobile connection or have sensitization programs to which you can gather what time of the day or the day of the week is the best time to reach out to them.
   

Phone is full

Whether it is a feature phone or smartphone, the SMS inbox can get filled to capacity with messages. This often results in cases where the phone device is unable to receive any additional messages.

Recommendation

1. Advise your contacts to clear or delete messages from their phone to allow for new messages to be received on their device. 
   

Want to learn more about SMS Messages and Delivery reports? Once a message is sent out, the Mobile networks that handle the delivery of an SMS message and report back on how the message went through what is called a message delivery report. Read our detailed article on how this works on the Echo platform and the different types of delivery status you can see on your SMS messages

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