Introduction

Important
The SMS Surveys extension is an Add-On. Commercial terms will apply.

This extension enables respondents to receive and reply to surveys using the SMS functionality on their mobile telephones.

When the SMS Survey extension is activated for your company, you can then activate the extension for your survey (go to Flex Extensions Overview for more information).

Note: You must activate the extension specifically for each survey that you want to use it in.

Note: The client company is responsible for acquiring the required SMS services, and must contract separately with a Forsta-approved SMS provider. Forsta does not resell SMS messaging, and is not responsible in any way for the SMS provider, the services provided by it, or any failures in its performance. Any support requests from the client relating to the SMS services must be routed directly by the client to that ESP.

Note: The cell plans sold by some mobile operators, by default, will block messages they interpret as being spam, social networking and/or “inappropriate material”. In this case, to receive messages that would otherwise be blocked, the respondent must change his/her account settings to disable the message-blocking functionality.

Points to note:

• The extension currently supports all question types except Hierarchy and searchable multi.
• "Other - please specify" answer options are not supported.
• All questions are displayed as text only.
• Grid, 3D-Grid, Open Text List and Numeric List questions are divided into separate Single/Multi/Numeric/Open Text questions.
• A chart is always shown as a simple table/list.
• The total size of a question, including text and answer alternatives, should be kept below 160 characters to avoid splitting the text message into multiple messages. Some SMS providers do not support long messages.
• Long text messages from respondents (> 160 characters, for example as an answer to an open-text question) are only supported by some SMS providers. Infobip concatenates large messages where possible, but it depends on the local mobile operator network capability. In the event a respondent sends a long message and it is not supported by the provider, the message may be truncated.
• Open surveys and limited surveys with and without password are supported (go to Limited Surveys for more information).
• When uploading respondents to the survey, use the mobile phone number including country code for the UserID.

Note: Remember that respondents will normally be charged for each SMS message they send, and depending on the respondent's mobile service provider, may also be charged for each SMS message they receive. In addition, these charges can increase considerably if the respondent is currently outside the country in which their mobile phone is registered. To reduce the chance of dissatisfied respondents, you should bear this cost in mind when designing your questionnaire and keep the number of questions to a minimum.