Highly Esteemed Customers,
I like to explain the impact of the NCC Do Not Disturb (DND) service on your bulk sms account.
What is DND?
Do Not Disturb (DND) has been introduced by the NCC (Nigerian Communications Commission) to, as the name implies, enable telecommunication subscribers to not be disturbed by third party promotional messages, which includes messages originating from all bulk sms gateways. This has been mandated by NCC for telecommunication networks to implement. So all telecommunications subscribers can subscribe.
Subscribers now subscribe to the service by sending 'STOP' to 2442 === This subscriber will not receive your bulk sms
While subscribers can unsubscribe by sending 'ALLOW' to 2442 === This subscriber should receive your bulk sms
I would implore you to read this news for more information https://techpoint.ng/2016/07/07/do-not-disturb-code-nigeria/
The bad side of it?
My experience and research in the bulk sms industry has revealed certain abnormalities and pit falls about the DND service.
- Some customers have not intentionally requested for this and they have been placed there by their networks. That is not the issue. The issue is these subscribers may not be able to cancel the DND service by sending 'ALLOW' to 2442. Even the customer care agents in the telecommunications networks facilities will not see that the DND is active on the subscribers not to talk of canceling it for the subscriber. This is a real mess for bulk sms businesses!
- Also trends have shown that High Valued Customers, i.e subscribers who spend much on their lines have been automatically placed on this list by their networks, probably the networks want their comfort so as not to loose them.
- Also trends have shown few new etisalat numbers with prefix 0909******* are also on this category.
How do we manage this?
MyCyber SMS has worked so hard to manage this issue. I will tell you how.
We can definitely not force sms to be sent against the NCC DND service on subscribers lines, but we have created a platform for our customers to pull delivery reports for their messages. The delivery reports reveals all statuses of messages sent from our portals and also tell you if your message was rejected due to the DND service. Isn't that great?
Learn more about the Delivery reports here.
The solution?
We should endeavour to tell our recipients that complain they have not been receiving our messages to simply send 'ALLOW' to 2442 to cancel the DND service on their lines, or contact their telecommunication networks customer care to resolve the issue for them.
