Troubleshooting SMS messages

Read the following articles to learn how to troubleshoot issues and errors when you are creating and managing SMS messages.

SMS - 403 Forbidden Error when trying to access Campaign Manager

SMS is enabled, but when I try to navigate to the SMS Campaign Manager from Acoustic Campaign, I get a 403 Forbidden page.

Log out of Acoustic Campaign. If this is your account and you are an Org Admin, log out after making any changes to your account. To resolve this, have an Org Admin perform the following steps:
  1. Navigate to Settings > User Accounts.
  2. Click the account receiving this error.
  3. Click to expand the User Permissions area.
  4. Deselect the Enable SMS option.
  5. Go back to Settings > User Accounts and click the username again.
  6. In Permissions, select Enable SMS.
  7. Log back in and attempt to access the SMS Campaign Manager.

Why wasn't the SMS automated message sent to contacts, despite meeting the query criteria?

The contacts do not have SMS consent. You can include query criteria to identify contacts who have SMS consent. On an SMS-enabled database, complete the steps below to proceed to the query builder.

  1. Click Profile and select Channel.
  2. In the Choose Channel Behavior list, select Is Opted-In to Channel.
  3. In Channel, select SMS.
  4. In Text to Join Program(s), click Choose and select one or more Text to Join programs.
  5. Click Done.

Search to find the article Creating a query for SMS consent for more details on how to identify contacts who have SMS consent.

Why are SMS messages shown as sent but not delivered in the SMS Campaign Manager?

The Sent status shows when messages leave the platform and is sent to the carrier. The Delivered status shows when the carrier (like T-Mobile or Verizon) receives the message and responds with a success code. It can take 24 hours to a week for the status to change. Not all carriers send a success code, which means that some messages might never change from Sent to Delivered.

Why does 'Null' appear in the Consent Source field in the contact's SMS consent record?

The SMS Consent Source field is populated in one of three ways.

Text-to-Join: If a contact joined your database by texting in then the SMS Consent Source shows 'Null' because this is the expected method of joining.

Import: If you import the SMS Consent then the SMS Consent Source displays either 'List Import' if there is no value present in the .csv file for the SMS Consent Source field, or if there is a value, then it shows 'NULL'.

Channel Consent or Contact By Channel REST API: If you issue a PUT or PATCH API call for the SMS contact, you can modify the Consent Source value.

Why do SMS messages fail to deliver?

There are quite a number of reasons why SMS messages fail to deliver to recipients.

  • Phone is turned off during the delivery window.
  • Device may be in roaming zone, due to the user traveling in out of network zone.
  • If the device is in roaming, the home carrier must have an inter-carrier agreement for the message delivery. If there is no such agreement, then the delivery will fail.
  • The owner of the mobile service account may be delinquent in the payment and the carrier turned off delivery of SMS messages until the payment issue is resolved.
  • The owner requested that his carrier is in the carrier's blacklist and does not want to receive any SMS messages.
  • Device may be configured to use other applications to receive SMS messages. The device may have forwarded the incoming SMS to other applications that the end-user may have specified in their phone.
  • There is no storage availability on the device for incoming message.
  • The carrier may have filtered the message because it was perceived as spam or inappropriate content.
  • The sender ID is not correct. The SMS message may not be delivered because of the fragmentation and complexity of the global bulk SMS industry and because different countries and carriers have different rules as to what can be displayed.
  • If you send a long SMS message and the carrier does not support long messages, the message may not deliver.
  • The SMS encoding may be incorrect. Typically, messages are sent using either unicode, which allows for 70 characters, or using the global standard GSM 3.38, which allows 160 characters.
  • There may be a network error on the carrier end. The only recourse is to resend.
  • Number portability issue may have occurred where the mobile phone number was switched from one carrier to another and the SMS aggregator is using the old carrier for the message delivery. Check if the end-user recently switched carriers.
  • Some carriers, including major tier 1 carriers such as Sprint, do not provide delivery notifications. If the DR was not reported, it does not mean that the SMS was not delivered to the device.