Rich Communication Services: The Future of Customer Communication?

We all love to communicate, but who would have thought that messaging would one day become the communication method of choice for most of us?

Research shows that most people today prefer to use messages, instead of phone calls or written letters. In fact, trillions of SMS texts are sent around the world each year.

However, SMS messages lack the rich media functionality and chat capability of consumer apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, WeChat, Skype, or iMessage.

How to solve this problem?

Rich Communication Services (RCS) is the next generation of SMS messaging. As like SMS, RCS offers a messaging service via your phone’s native inbox and it is text-based, however what makes the difference is that RCS messaging supports rich media, such as video, audio, images, texts, buttons & group chat.

RCS, or rich communication services, is a communications protocol that offers increased capabilities over traditional text-based SMS. It is designed to make ‘new’ messaging feel more like the messages received in apps that have rich formats, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

SMS messages have one of the highest open rates when compared to other channels like email or social media. RCS elevates this key opportunity for marketers even further, enabling them to strengthen relationships and engage with customers through branded two-way communications, no matter their suite of messaging apps.

Here’s how RCS messaging is set to revolutionise customer communications and offer huge benefits to your consumers and your business.

The key benefits of RCS messaging for marketing and customer communication

RCS provides a richer user experience than SMS and allows customers to engage and collaborate with senders, providing near real-time feedback.

Customers can now be reached without installing any specific app on their phone, and still guarantee a richer media experience with the possibility to use videos, chatbots, images, text, audio and location sharing.

The format allows marketers to promote their product with higher-quality media (images, video, and audio) while maintaining the customer’s privacy – unlike other messaging platforms. Furthermore, due to the rich media experience, trusted conversations are ensured without ever needing to leave the RCS inbox.

Some key applications for RCS are:

• PERSONA-BASED MARKETING: You can utilize a highly targeted method of engagement by using the customers’ preference for content consumption, whether this is text-based, meme-centric communications, or something else.
• VIRTUALLY NEAR REAL-TIME CONFIRMATION: With RCS, you can communicate in near real-time with your customers. This is of benefit when providing updates on an order status, making product announcements, and offering a higher quality of customer service.
• DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING: RCS enables you to get a clearer picture of campaign performance by measuring read receipts, transactions, and other replies and actions.

Branded communications for higher trust

Share rich, branded content (e.g. carousels, gifs, and videos with – company name, logo, and colors), keeping messages aligned with the rest of your marketing efforts. This allows your messages to be much more visually appealing than SMS, attracting customers’ attention. You can create interactive campaigns using features that the customer already recognizes, such as location-sharing, action buttons, click-to-dial, and CTAs. All this promotes much higher engagement than a traditional text messaging, providing an interactive experience right within the customer’s messaging app without even using any other app.

Additionally, when a sender is registered as a verified RCS agent, they have a branded profile that can be viewed by the recipient when they click on the brand within the message.

Addressing the security concerns of RCS messaging

RCS can certainly be a secure channel, but it requires several steps in preparation. For example, all senders need to be registered and verified by the RCS service provider to ensure authentication, fraud prevention, and trustworthy communication for brands and their customers.

Also keep in mind when using RCS, that not every end-user (customer) is willing to provide personal or financial details through a mobile messaging platform, unless you have ensured that multiple authentication steps are in place. Implementing multi-factor authentication and ensuring senders are registered and verified by the RCS service helps establish trust upfront and minimize concerns around data security.

RCS provides protection to both brands and consumers via the Universal Profile standard v2.2, a message verification and brand certification process, unlikely from Whatsapp and other messaging applications, which deliver messages with end-to-end encryption. RCS makes the data secure point-to-point and ensures that consumers are interacting with legitimate parties.

Soprano incorporating RCS messaging to enhance customer communications

Soprano’s RCS solution is part of our comprehensive multi-channel platform. With our RCS solution, we have made it incredibly easy to design an interactive RCS experience with a drag & drop designer and then simply send these RCS messages to RCS-enabled devices.

Using our RCS service, you can also design automated workflows including responses, questions, and reactions to any incoming messages from customers. Senders who hesitate to utilize RCS because of deliverability concerns have a solution in Soprano Connect. Our RCS capabilities are paired with a fall-back feature, which automatically checks device compatibility and will send similar content in SMS format to incompatible devices.

Easily creating, managing, tracking, and analyzing RCS messaging is just one component of our full marketing platform, which also includes voice, email, SMS, WhatsApp for business, and more.

Ready to stand out from the crowd with the RCS solution? We would love to hear from you. Contact us for a platform demo or to see how we can drive your business messaging further.