Delivery Receipts (DLR) On Your WhatsApp Surveys, SMS Surveys, and IVR Survey Calls – And What They Mean
Delivery receipts, also known as DLRs, are important information that tells you what happened to the message that you sent; whether it was delivered to the recipient or not. We cannot guarantee that delivery receipts are available across all destination networks, but when they are, you can see them on the downloadable Excel report of your engageSPARK campaigns. Most mobile network operators (MNOs) return a delivery receipt while others do not, and in some cases, these are not reliable enough.
In this article, we will be explaining what these different delivery receipts in your WhatsApp surveys, SMS surveys, and IVR surveys mean.
WhatsApp Surveys Delivery Status
In Progress: This status means that your message has been sent from engageSPARK but hasn’t been received by the recipient’s device yet. Please note that this delivery status can change over time to “Delivered”, “Read”, or “Failed”
Confirmed/Delivered: This status means that your message has been successfully delivered to the recipient’s device but has not been read by the recipient. Please note this status will change to “Read” when the recipient opens the message. This is equivalent to seeing two checkmarks in WhatsApp when sending someone a message. This is what you’d see if the message has been delivered to the person’s phone but they haven’t read it yet (or they have read receipts turned off).
Read: This status means that the recipient has opened and read your message. Note that WhatsApp clients can disable this functionality—this means that if you get a “Read” status, you can be sure they’ve seen your message. But if you do not get one, you cannot know if they have. This is equivalent to seeing two checkmarks that are blue in WhatsApp when sending someone a message.
Failed/Not Delivered: This status means that your message was not delivered to the recipient’s device for various reasons like you’re not using a pre-approved WhatsApp template, the recipient is not on WhatsApp and other technical issues. The error column in the WhatsApp log sheet of the Downloadable report should give you more details.
Sent: Sent to WhatsApp successfully. This is equivalent to seeing one checkmark in WhatsApp when sending someone a message. This is what you’d see if the message hasn’t been delivered to the person’s phone (e.g., their phone isn’t online/is turned off). This can change to delivered later once the person reconnects to the internet on their phone / turns their phone back on.
SMS Surveys Delivery Status
Sent: This status means that your message has been sent from engageSPARK to the telecommunications company (telco) but there was no confirmation from the telco whether the message was received on the handset or not. This can be for a variety of reasons:
1. Telco-specific – some telcos or all telcos in the country you are sending SMS to do not support sending back delivery receipts.
2. Handset-specific – some mobile devices do not support sending back a confirmation to the telco that the message arrived on the handset.
In most cases, we can assume that the SMS has been received by the recipient.
Delivered/Success: This status means that your message has been successfully delivered to the recipient’s device.
Read: Unlike WhatsApp, SMS does not provide a “read” status, so engageSPARK won’t be able to tell if the recipient has read your message.
Failed: This status means that your message was not delivered to the recipient’s device. This can happen if the recipient’s device is turned off for a long time, if there is a network issue, or if the recipient has blocked receiving certain types of messages (e.g., marketing messages).
IVR Surveys Delivery Status
Not answered: This status means that the recipient did not answer the IVR call. If you have an automated call retry set up in your IVR survey, the system will automatically try calling the person again based on your retry schedule.
Answered: This status means that the recipient picked up the call.
Not Answered: NORMAL_TEMPORARY_FAILURE: This can mean that the telco network is having a temporary network issue at the time of the call. If you have an automated call retry set up in your IVR survey, the system will automatically try calling the person again based on your retry schedule.
Not Answered: UNALLOCATED_NUMBER: This means that the number cannot be reached because it has not been allocated to a customer yet by the telco. You might encounter this issue if you do a lot of random digit dialing (RDD).
Not Answered: CALL_REJECTED: This means that the recipient rejected or canceled the call.
invalid call: unsupported number: This status indicates that the phone number is either invalid or incorrect. in a valid format or is not complete
Not Answered User Busy: This means the participant is currently engaged on another phone call and will not be able to accept your call.
RECOVERY_ON_TIMER_EXPIRE: This means the phone number did not ring at all and there was no error provided by the recipient’s network provider, so the call was terminated. This is usually a network problem.
SUBSCRIBER_ABSENT: This means the mobile device is not reachable at the moment because it is either switched off or has no network signal. It is also used when a person’s phone is temporarily unavailable at any user-network interface. This is a temporary issue so if you have an automated call retry set up in your IVR survey, the system will automatically try calling the person again based on your retry schedule.
CALL_REJECTED_DND: This means that all incoming calls to the recipient are blocked because they’ve enabled the Do Not Disturb (DND) setting on their phone.
UNKNOWN: This means that the call failed at the telco level for reasons not known to them.
NO_USER_RESPONSE: This status is when the called person didn’t respond to the call within a certain time limit (decided by the telecom operator, we don’t have much control over it)
INCOMING_CALL_BARRED: This status means that the recipient’s phone number is registered on the network but incoming calls are barred from coming into their phones. They may have to contact their network service provider to get themselves unbarred.
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