Deliverability What happens when your provider has deliverability issues with a carrier?
Two weeks ago, Ufone Pakistan announced that they would be applying new filtering on all international A2P traffic. This had caused some concern with providers, but they were all confident that their traffic would continue to get through as per usual. However, this was not the case.
On Friday two weeks ago, Ufone applied the new filtering. We were monitoring our Ufone traffic’s conversion rate closely in real-time. We began to see a drop in conversion on both our main and backup SMS providers to Ufone. In the space of 10 minutes, only 10-15% of our SMS were now going through on our main and backup routes. We immediately started testing Ufone routes with our other providers.
Surprisingly, only two providers, one international and one Middle Eastern, were not having deliverability issues with Ufone at this time. With just a few clicks, we were able to reroute all our Ufone traffic through these routes and our conversion rates returned to their normal, high levels.
In the meantime, we had reached out to our main and backup providers for Ufone traffic, asking them to investigate the deliverability issues. While their support was up to their usual high standards, it still took a few hours (1.5hrs for one, 3hrs for the other) for them to completely resolve the filtering issue.
True Single API Call
While a number of verification providers describe themselves as a ‘true single API call’, from our experience described above, this is clearly not the case. Of course, each provider has multiple routes to each carrier, but often when there’s a bigger issue like this new filtering, the providers experience issues on all their routes to the given carrier. Also, what if your provider has an issue and it can’t deliver any SMS for you? To avoid this, you’d need to build into your codebase some logic that monitors your traffic and conversion, and then routes your traffic through a different provider if there’s an issue – quite a distraction from building your core product!
Thankfully, at RingCaptcha, we are a true single API call. You make one API call and we do the rest. With our connections to multiple providers, both international providers and local, region-specific providers, we monitor your traffic and conversion rates closely, and as soon as there is a drop in quality, your traffic is rerouted through a different provider.
While all major providers’ support is of very high quality and always fast to respond and help with your issues, relying on one single provider is still a risky decision. For this Ufone incident, our two main providers experienced deliverability issues for up to 3 hours. This may not sound so bad, but what if you’re using phone number verification for signups? How many signups would you have lost in those 3 hours? If you use phone number verification for high-value transactions and make revenue from fees on these transactions, how much revenue would you have lost in these 3 hours?
We fully acknowledge that there may be times when ALL providers have issues with a given carrier. When this happens, there, unfortunately, is not much that can be done, unless you fall back to another form of 2FA. But for all the other times, when just one or a couple of providers experience deliverability issues, wouldn’t you want your verification traffic to still get delivered with just one true single API call? At RingCaptcha we monitor your traffic on account, country, and carrier levels. If our system sees any drops in conversion, we can instantly pinpoint the carrier/s having the problems and reroute your traffic on these carriers through a different provider.
We hope this post was useful to you and that it helped you realize that not all ‘true single API calls’ are in fact true single API calls. If you’d like to learn more about RingCaptcha’s offering, just contact us through our live chat (blue chat button in bottom right corner of your screen) or drop us a line – hello@ringcaptcha.com. We are the experts of phone number verification and conversion rate optimization with a suite of tools to prove it 🙂
