By Nisheeth Mohan

Are you depending on common short codes to engage mobile consumers?

Now that advertisers have discovered the power and immediacy of the mobile medium, CSCs are being used for both sales generation and, increasingly, loyalty programs and branding. Engaging the end user in an interactive exchange is good for business -- when it works.

The recently released Keynote Common Short Code Study pointed out the challenges that are facing even the heavily branded mobile content providers in offering consistent and acceptable service levels to end users.

A month-long Service Level Rating study of 24 popular CSCs listed CBS, Coca-Cola, Chase, The New York Times and Obopay as leaders in reliability (CBS and Coca-Cola getting 100 percent scores).

Obopay, Wells Fargo, The New York Times, Thumbplay and Chase led in responsiveness. (Responsiveness took into account average performance, carrier consistency, performance variability and load handling.)

Nonetheless, there was room for improvement.

Half of the group had less that 98 percent average peak period service availability.

That means that more than 2 percent of the time end users wonder where their query went and move on to another source.

The complex delivery ecosystem makes it even more difficult for content providers to track the exact point of failure. One perennial question which every content provider has in case of SMS delivery failure is, Does the problem lie in the carrier or aggregator's network?

There is no easy way to track that, but distributed monitoring can help to a certain extent.

For example, monitoring your CSC from four locations and over four carriers.

If the text messages are failing only on one carrier in all locations, the problem lies with the carrier. However, if the text messages are not getting delivered across multiple carriers, chances are that the problem is with the aggregator.

No matter how sophisticated the coding of your application, in the complex mobile ecosystem there will be some variability in your CSCs performance.

Over the period of the study, the average response for an SMS message sent via a CSC was around 9 seconds.

The fastest responded in less than 6 seconds, while the slowest averaged more than 19 seconds.

As the "wow" factor of being able to interact at all over a mobile device is replaced with the "impatience" factor of someone whose skills were honed playing Grand Theft Auto, each second is going to become increasingly expensive in terms of end user experience satisfaction ratings.

As a marketer, you are aware that you are in competition with your own service, as well as with competitors.

As mobile end users grow more sophisticated, their overall expectations for performance and content change. Even if your service is at the top of the performance ratings today, your customers will expect more tomorrow.

As you develop and execute your CSC-based interactive end user experiences, whether for revenue or branding, make sure that you build in a program that provides for ongoing test and measurement of your service as well as your industry.

We are on the leading edge of an exciting new technology and the road to success lies in constantly studying the terrain and making course corrections -- not only reactively, but also proactively.

Nisheeth Mohan is product manager for mobile solutions and technology at Keynote Systems Inc., a mobile and Internet test and measurement services firm in San Mateo, CA. Reach him at .