Use outbound SMS reporting to get a quick overview on message performance and see how this is impacting your overall customer engagement. By seeing this data side-by-side with other proactive support messages, you have full context on any conversations taking place with your customers.
This article will show you where to find the most important data and what it tells you.
The Messages list
You can find top level metrics at a glance from the All messages list and SMS messages list:
Each individual message
Every SMS you send will show outbound reporting for:
Click tracking (coming soon).
Sent reporting
For each SMS message you send, you’ll see the number of customers the SMS message was delivered to, and when the message was delivered.
Delivery issue reporting
There are many common reasons why SMS messages can fail to deliver to customers. This delivery report displays the number of issues for a particular SMS message, which customer experienced those issues, and what the reason was.
Here’s a breakdown of possible SMS delivery issues:
Issue reason | What it means | Possible fix |
“Unable to deliver to landline or unreachable carrier.” | The destination number is unable to receive this message. Potential reasons could include trying to reach a landline or an unreachable carrier. | If landline - Remove landline number from phone attribute and replace with a mobile number for customer - or remove customer from targeting. |
“Message content was too long for carrier.” | The message being sent is too long to be broken up into Segments and sent via SMS. Can happen if a message is over 1800 characters long (sometimes caused by very long user attributes). | Shorten the message - ensure that any user attributes are not long enough to cause you to breach 1800 characters. |
“Too many messages scheduled - please contact support.” | Can happen if a customer tries to send 100’s of thousands of messages at once from one of our numbers. Certain number types can only handle so many SMS messages queued at once. | If you are hitting these limits - contact support. |
“Recipient number was unreachable.” | For an unknown reason, the phone could not be reached to deliver the SMS message. Can happen based on SIM issues or numbers being de-registered in countries. | If it continues to happen, remove the customer’s number from their profile. |
“Recipient has unsubscribed from receiving messages.” | This can happen in the US where the customer has unsubscribed at the carrier level from receiving messages from our number but that unsubscribe has not been captured inside Intercom. | Add that customer to the ‘unsubscribed’/’opted-out’ list inside of Intercom so we no longer try to send them messages. |
“Carrier unable to process message at this time.” | Sometimes some phone carriers can get overloaded or have their systems go down and the SMS message will not be delivered to any numbers on that carrier’s network. | Retry sending the message at a later time. |
“Recipient's country is unsupported.” | A message was attempted to be delivered to a number outside our supported countries. | Review the customer’s phone number that is being sent to - adjust it if necessary. |
“Something went wrong - please contact support.” | This will be shown when something has gone wrong that requires our team to fix on your account. | Contact support. |
Response reporting
You’ll also see any keyword replies along with the first non-keyword response to an SMS message. The report shows the customer’s response and which keyword group it matched (if any).
Note: You can filter this by the keyword group matched.
This is great for:
Seeing what type of common first questions or queries customers had in relation to an outbound SMS.
Understanding the engagement with an SMS if you asked a question or required a response.
Customer engagement report
The Customer engagement report includes SMS message data, so you can see how SMS is working alongside your other proactive support messages to drive customer engagement:
Messaging Data CSV export
SMS engagement data is also included in the CSV export from the Customer engagement report.
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