Topic

Message delivery method best practices.

Description

Delivery methods within Everbridge 360 are the specified ways your Contacts receive your notifications, such as through SMS, Email, or Voice Calls. These delivery methods are configured by Administrators in the Everbridge Manager Portal.

Everbridge strongly recommends using as many communication modalities as possible for each Contact. Using multiple delivery methods is the only way to dramatically increase the probability that your critical messages are delivered to your Contacts. 

This is especially true for SMS messaging.                                                    

The problem with SMS

As a communication tool, text messages are a little bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, SMS is immediate, direct, and exceedingly common.

On the other hand, longer SMS messages are easily malformed (especially when they have to be broken apart by the provider and reassembled on your device). Carriers in many parts of the word are notoriously unreliable in terms of delivery, and the service can be very costly to both the sender and the responder.

While Everbridge makes every effort to ensure successful 2-way SMS communication, it is for these reasons, that Everbridge recommends against relying solely on SMS messaging.