About 2sms

2sms allows business customers to send text messages from their computer to cell phones anywhere in the world. We help customers improve operations, demonstrate duty of care, and react more responsively to customers. Text messaging reaches more people than email and faster than calling.

Overview

This document explains the service levels that a SMS+ customer can expect to receive, and outlines the trigger points for automatic rebates. SMS Lite customers do not benefit from this SLA.

Service Description

The design goal of the service is to deliver a text message to the network in under 60 seconds. Typically, messages are delivered in under 5 seconds. It is important to highlight the key stages of the journey of a message, and to identify the controllable and uncontrollable element of the service. Our job is to submit a text message, received from a customer, to the GSM/CDMA network, in a timely manner. Further, our job is to receive updates from the GSM/CDMA network relating to the delivery status of the message, and provide this information in report form to the customer.

The following table defines the controllable and uncontrollable aspects of the process. By controllable, we mean any process that we manage and control, and to which this SLA relates. Uncontrollable events are beyond the scope of this SLA.

Service Levels

1. 2sms will provide a service availability (uptime) of 99.99%.
2. 2sms will deliver 97% of messages within 60 seconds. We call this our service standard. We publish our performance stats on our web site. It is important to note that our process is essentially a queue management process. We deliver messages on a first in first out basis (FIFO), e.g. the earlier a message is sent to us, the higher priority we assign the message in the queue. We define message delivery as the successful submission of a message from our message queue, (received from a customer) to the network. This includes confirmation from the network that the message has been accepted for onward delivery to the destination cell phone. It is important to note that we cannot offer a service level on the delivery of a message to a recipient phone, as the recipient phone may not be in a state that facilitates delivery, e.g. it is switched off, out of service area, the GSM/CDMA cell it is in is busy, or the SIM card on the phone is full. We use a concept of message status to identify the delivery status of a message.

Status Description

• Pending : Received from customer.
• Scheduled : Message delivery delayed by customer to a later date.
• WithNetwork : Message submitted to the network and awaiting delivery confirmation from the destination cell phone.
• Message accepted : Message accepted by the network, and awaiting delivery to recipient phone.
• Success : A successful delivery of a SMS text message.
• Failed_XXXXX : Message delivery failed, where XXXXX is the reason.

This SLA covers delivery to the WithNetwork status, which is the boundary of our controllable process. Our normal operations see messages delivered in between 1 and 5 seconds. Traffic will normally be delayed for one of three reasons.

• Volume of traffic on our network
• A failure in our process
• A failure in the GSM/CDMA network

While we aim to deliver 97% of messages in under 60 seconds, fluctuations in demand mean that there are typically two or three occasions per day when this standard cannot be met. This is the equivalent of ‘SMS rush hour’. We therefore take account of this normal business experience in determining our rebate trigger. Our rebate trigger is the maximum time a message should take for delivery before accepting
that we are in breach of our SLA. For our standard service, this is 300 seconds, or 5 minutes.

Our final calculation is then to assess how many messages in a 24 hour period have breached our rebate trigger. If more than 3% of messages for a specific customer are delayed by more than 300 seconds, then the cost of those messages will be rebated to the customer.
Our 24 hour period runs 00:00 GMT/UMT to 23:59 GMT/UMT.

Customer’s attention is drawn to the clause in our terms and conditions that states that we are only responsible for the cost of the message sent, not the value of the content. It is a condition of service that we are not held liable for any consequential loss that delivery failure or delay may directly or indirectly cause.

Service standard

97 % of messages in less than 60 seconds.
Rebate trigger : 3% of messages delivered in more than 300 seconds.
Rebate amount : Number of rebated messages are credited to customer account by increasing their message credit balance.

Should rebates apply, they will be calculated within 3 days of calendar month end, and applied for all qualifying messages sent in the past calendar month. For example, any messages that qualify for rebate for messages sent in October will be credited to the customer account by November 3rd. An email will be sent to the registered email address to confirm this process. For EU customers, their statutory rights are not affected.

Customer Service

Customer service is provided to all customers via our free phone customer service centre (US 877-876-2766 UK 0800 65 222 77) 24/7, or directly on +1 224 353 2600 or +44 1234 757 800. We operate a duty manager process, where a dedicated resource, capable of resolving problems, is on call. We do not operate a scripted call centre, since we believe customers want access to the problem solvers, not incident recorders.

Exceptions to a Rebate Trigger

Our rebate triggers apply for normal business, and relate to the controllable part of our service. There are however 4 scenarios where we reserve the right to suspend the rebate triggers. If any of these scenarios occur, we will post service notes on our web site and send emails to our customers to alert them.

• Force Majeure : Please refer to our terms and conditions for detailed definitions, which follow industry practice. GSM/CDMA network failures beyond our control.
• If any of the major networks are down, we cannot deliver messages to subscribers on that network.
• Significant abnormal event, e.g. 9/11
• A significant national or world event can trigger traffic levels that are orders of magnitude more than normal levels. In such instances, the ability to offer a service to our normal service levels is not possible.
• Key days:
  • Our trigger rebates do not apply for traffic on 31.12 from 12:00 to 23:59, and on 01.01 from 00:00 to 06:00, when traffic on the GSM/CDMA network generally is so high that service levels are impossible to maintain.
• We may from time to time communicate other key dates. These are very rare, and will occur for example if the TV networks are running a large SMS campaign, which is saturating the network. Such events are beyond our control.

Systems Maintenance

Our systems are monitored by a range of manual and automated systems at all times. We do invite customers to communicate with us in the event of a problem arising, as this will assist us in resolving problems more quickly. Our duty manager is available 24/7, and the rest of the team are on standby.