|
03/20/25
Good Morning,
This year, Realtime's Notification Module has faced challenges as we work through a new vendor integration, updated phone carrier protocols, and evolving federal regulations surrounding email, SMS, and voice notifications. We recognize the inconvenience and frustration this has caused. While these issues have not been resolved as quickly as we had hoped, the delays are not due to a lack of urgency but rather the complexities we’ve encountered and the necessary optimizations. Below, we provide an update on the current status, next steps, and new features aimed at improving your notification success rates.
Status and Next Steps
Response Times:
- We have successfully optimized the delivery times for SMS, email, and voice notifications.
-
Each district should now experience acceptable delivery times when sending notifications, including mass notifications.
-
Realtime has collaborated with Ivrnet (the new vendor) to optimize response times within acceptable limits, even during peak capacities, such as in a state-wide emergency. In such a scenario, all districts will use the notification system to send SMS, emails, and voice messages to students and staff simultaneously, which could push Ivrnet’s throughput and response times to its limits.
- For a model based on 140,000 students with three contacts per student (420,000 contacts), 45,000 school staff, a 25% variance, and 25% redials for voice messages, we anticipate: a) 476,250 transactions via SMS and email b) 595,312 voice recordings being sent. Expected response times for this scenario load are as follows:
-
SMS: 5 minutes
-
Emails: 10 minutes
-
Voice: A maximum of 119 minutes for 1-minute voice recordings, including redials.
Next Steps: Realtime will continue to work with Ivrnet to optimize voice response times during maximum throughput scenarios.
Caller ID:
- Ivrnet continues to submit the whitelisting attestation to the carriers. This has been done for all known phone numbers. However, the progress has not been as we have desired, as each carrier has different processing times.
Next Step: Realtime will continue to work on this issue with each of your districts that has this problem and Ivrnet.
SMS & Call Blocking:
- When school district numbers began to be blocked for some of our partners, we immediately added two additional numbers that would then be used for a second and third time if a voice call did not go through. This rotation happens every 10 minutes for a total of three attempts. This allows for redundancy and has dramatically improved success rates.
Next Step: Realtime will continue to pursue whitelisting of the original phone number.
Below is information that explains how the industry landscape has changed to combat spam and has affected the notification system.
-
https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication as illegal activity is frequently connected with spoofing; this is the move to Caller ID Authentication as a higher level of security. It was mandatory for voice service providers to implement STIR/SHAKEN in the IP portions of the voice networks (carriers) by June 30, 2021. Our former Notification partner (RAVE/Swiftreach) was originally exempt but has confirmed with us that they are having the same issues.
-
All district phone numbers, including additional numbers for redundancy, have been registered with this site. https://www.freecallerregistry.com/fcr/ This is the joint entity of the analytics companies of AT&T (Hiya), Verizon (TNS) and T-Mobile (First Orion) who are responsible for the decision to flag items as spam or blocking.
-
Outbound Communication Best Practices - This comprehensive document provides details of SMS, Email and Voice best practices based on regulations and data quality. Please review this document to understand the limitations of messages to prevent blocking.
New Features
To assist our customers with correcting invalid contact data, we have provided options to analyze failure results. We encourage reviewing the results and statistics to help understand notification success.
The expectation is that Notification Module users review the results of SMS, email and voice, note failures and then take action to update the student's contact information with valid email addresses and phone numbers. This is a critical step because sending to invalid contact information repeatedly causes degradation and develops a poor reputation for the domain name and caller phone numbers.
Individual Job Results – Communication>Notification>Actions>Previously Sent Notifications Within this view you can import results, view results and view statistics of jobs that have already been sent.
Example of Results:
| 
