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> even if Twilio sends something at 10am it might not be sent by Verizon until 11am. This absolutely impacts off-hour SMS sending. Suppose my business is softw

> even if Twilio sends something at 10am it might not be sent by Verizon until 11am. This absolutely impacts off-hour SMS sending. Suppose my business is software for restaurants to notify customers their table is ready via text. How would I mitigate this?

ShrigmaMale 5y ago
Yeah same type problem here, notification is time sensitive and I haven't figured out how to make sure delivery is fast.
- twunde 5y ago
  For time-sensitive SMS, one solution is to have basically a fast queue and a normal speed queue. Essentially have a phone number (or numbers) that are reserved for the fast SMS and only use it for time-sensitive requests like OTP. Everything else goes through a normal speed phone number. Alternatively, if all your SMS messages are time-sensitive, you'll likely want to use several phone numbers and try to load balance requests so that the queue size for each phone number is always small/at or near 0. There's also an outside chance that your SMS provider may have an option to pay for faster delivery like email providers do. I don't recall seeing that option, but I have to imagine that at least one provider has this.
trcarney 5y ago
Just browsing through AWS documentation, it looks like you can set the SMSType to Transactional for critical messages that support customer transactions. I'm not sure if other providers have this option but looking for an SMS Type you can set may be a good place to start. The link to where I found the information is below. They don't talk too much about it. They use the example of an OTP so that should work for your use case as well. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sms_publish-to-phone.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sms_publish-to-pho...
electroly 5y ago
Make a mobile app so you can send push notifications to most customers instead. It seems like this is the way most businesses go, the massive proliferation of one-off apps on customer phones notwithstanding.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Call their phone programmatically if you send a text with a request to confirm and don't receive the confirmation back within X minutes.
twunde 5y ago
It wasn't clear from the context whether you wanted to mitigate throttled delivery or off-hours delivery. If its the former I responded below to ShrigmaMale. If its the latter, consult your legal team but you'll likely need to ensure that you're marked as type transactional. I wouldn't be surprised if you needed some specific language in your opt-ins. There's clearly a distinction between seamless sending you a text off hours because of an action you did, and say Geico sending a transactional SMS saying your new ID cards are ready.

ShrigmaMale 5y ago

Yeah same type problem here, notification is time sensitive and I haven't figured out how to make sure delivery is fast.

twunde 5y ago
For time-sensitive SMS, one solution is to have basically a fast queue and a normal speed queue. Essentially have a phone number (or numbers) that are reserved for the fast SMS and only use it for time-sensitive requests like OTP. Everything else goes through a normal speed phone number. Alternatively, if all your SMS messages are time-sensitive, you'll likely want to use several phone numbers and try to load balance requests so that the queue size for each phone number is always small/at or near 0. There's also an outside chance that your SMS provider may have an option to pay for faster delivery like email providers do. I don't recall seeing that option, but I have to imagine that at least one provider has this.

trcarney 5y ago

Just browsing through AWS documentation, it looks like you can set the SMSType to Transactional for critical messages that support customer transactions. I'm not sure if other providers have this option but looking for an SMS Type you can set may be a good place to start. The link to where I found the information is below. They don't talk too much about it. They use the example of an OTP so that should work for your use case as well. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sms_publish-to-phone.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sms_publish-to-pho...

electroly 5y ago

Make a mobile app so you can send push notifications to most customers instead. It seems like this is the way most businesses go, the massive proliferation of one-off apps on customer phones notwithstanding.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Call their phone programmatically if you send a text with a request to confirm and don't receive the confirmation back within X minutes.

twunde 5y ago

It wasn't clear from the context whether you wanted to mitigate throttled delivery or off-hours delivery. If its the former I responded below to ShrigmaMale. If its the latter, consult your legal team but you'll likely need to ensure that you're marked as type transactional. I wouldn't be surprised if you needed some specific language in your opt-ins. There's clearly a distinction between seamless sending you a text off hours because of an action you did, and say Geico sending a transactional SMS saying your new ID cards are ready.