In marketing, messaging, or business, there’s always something new around the corner. Today, we’re looking at RCS, or Rich Communication Services, the next generation of SMS. Consider this:
- 8.2 billion people in the world
- Around 90% of all those people have a mobile phone
- All phones have SMS, but 1.1 billion users (2024) have something better
While SMS has been a reliable communication tool for over 30 years, a new and innovative solution, RCS Business Messaging, is now making waves. What does this mean for businesses, organisations, decision-makers, and everyday individuals?
Why should anyone care? Let’s find out.
What is RCS Business Messaging?
Simply put, RCS Business Messaging (RBM in short) is a specialised solution for brands to achieve their business objectives using RCS Messaging. Using this, companies can run promotions, offer support, and, moreover, do more for their customers.
It can be compared to WhatsApp Business, although it offers some distinct advantages. Like millions of companies using SMS for communication, sales, and verification, RBM offers the same, only better.
Celitix offers a better way to integrate RCS into their communication workflows. The CPaaS platform lets business owners & decision-makers leverage the latest communication tech without starting from scratch. You’re not in this alone!
RCS Business Messaging: Advantages
Now we’re getting into the juicy details! Let’s look at a comprehensive list of the benefits of RCS Business Messaging for Brands, Developers & Institutions:
- Verified Senders: Every profile on RBM is checked & verified, ensuring that the senders are all who they say they are. Build trust & gain legitimacy for your brand as a verified sender.
- Custom Branding: Add your brand’s colours & logo to your RCS Business Messaging chats. Solidify your brand positioning with smarter marketing that earns loyalty by forming an emotional connection with your target groups.
- Rich Media Support: Share high-resolution videos, images, presentations, documents & more. Enchant users with the power of graphics, images & engaging content to pique their interest.
- Rich Card Carousels: Enhance your outreach by supercharging your promotions with up to 10-slide carousels of rich message cards. Nudge your leads to act with custom CTAs for each slide & reuse your IG creatives.
- Auto Replies & Suggested Actions: Automate your messaging communication with customisable keyword-based auto-replies. Redirect users with attractive buttons on your brand’s messages.
- AI Chatbots: Leverage the latest language AI-gen models that match the tone & style of your customers, going above & beyond one-way messaging.
- Data Analytics: Engagement metrics like click-through rates, open rates & conversion data to learn what works for campaign optimisation.
- Programmable APIs: RBM allows advanced automation through bot integration that responds to set triggers. Celitix has you covered with pre-approved & ready-to-use APIs for every need.
All these features give your brand an edge in a competitive market by providing outstanding customer experiences. In our fast-paced world of modern convenience, don’t underestimate how much of an impact that can make!
Why Choose RCS Business Messaging?
The question might arise in your mind: “If OTT platforms already provide rich messaging, & RCS also runs over the internet, why bother with it?” It’s a valid query common to astute strategists. (Like you!) Let’s break it down:
- OTT’s Disadvantage: Consider a click to WhatsApp (CTWA) ad. User sees an ad & it redirects them to the brand’s chat on WA. Yet there are also delays: browser redirects & permissions (to exit the app & open WhatsApp).
- Seamless Experience: Since RCS is built right into the phone’s software, redirects & usage are far smoother. The messaging experience also tends to be better, since RCS is lighter than most external OTT apps.
- Email + SMS + OTT = RCS: SMS are the most accessible. OTT apps provide better texting experiences. Emails build intimate, one-on-one distribution channels that connect you to customers. RCS combines the best of all three.
- Universal Reach: Unlike most other mediums, RCS business messaging offers a foolproof channel to fall back on: If a message is not delivered, it can be sent as an SMS (& billed accordingly).
- Competitive Advantage: 50+ million brands use WhatsApp Business. Many more use SMS. Yet RCS is an emerging channel ripe with potential!
Ultimately, all brands must face this truth: business necessitates communication. Marketing your products/services effectively, notifying customers of their purchase & OTP verification are just some examples.
Most brands follow these standards to ensure their survival & deliver on user expectations. If your brand uses these touchpoints to solidify your brand message & form an emotional connection, it can give you a real edge.
An integrated communication platform like Celitix allows you to customise every message, ensuring a highly polished brand experience that improves ROI. Now let’s look at some real-world success stories.
RCS Business Messaging: Case Studies
While RCS is still a new channel, many companies have already used it to achieve promising results. We’ve seen several large-scale RCS campaigns with publicly available metrics. Here are a few big ones:
Brand Case Study: Subway
(Quick Service Restaurant, USA)
Starting with a familiar brand & easy-to-understand business model:
What They Did:
- Subway ran a promotional campaign in Cincinnati, LA & Houston
- It relied on A/B Testing to measure the effectiveness of RCS over SMS
- The company ran two promotions with a 2-week gap
- Half of their opt-in customer list received the offer as an SMS
- The other half received the same offers as the RCS
The Results:
- Both groups received the exact two offers with identical text content
- With the addition of branding, a verified profile, a CTA button & an attractive product image, RCS performed 140% & 50% better on both campaigns, respectively
Paraphrasing Subway’s Chief Digital Officer: “We saw RCS as a small, incremental upgrade to our present communication workflow that promised a sea of results.”
Countless promotional messages are already sent worldwide daily via SMS. This campaign solidifies that promotional text messages deliver better results on RCS.
Totalplay (TV & Internet Subscriptions, Mexico)
Next up is a not-so-familiar Mexican entertainment & telecom service provider called Totalplay:
What They Did:
- Totalplay was sending 1 million monthly payment requests via SMS to their customers, asking them to renew their TV subscriptions
- The low read receipts & engagement forced them to invest in call centres that outreached delinquent accounts, asking them to pay their dues
- They partnered with a telecom expert like Celitix to enhance their outreach via RCS
The Results:
- With branded chats, attractive media & buttons, the company boosted response rates
- They also provided customers with multiple payment options right within the renewal reminder chat
- Using RCS, Totalplay saw an impressive 65% increase in collection rates, with a 78% better response than SMS
By providing 4 different payment options within the chat, adding visuals to communicate more easily & enhancing trust with a verified profile, Totalplay eliminated sales barriers & improved conversion rates.
Any service-based business can follow a similar strategy to optimise its communication, sales & support workflows using RCS.
Orange (Telecom Network Provider, France)
Finally, here is an example of how marketing agencies, telecom service providers & freelancers can leverage RCS with Celitix’s CPaaS platform to enhance their offerings:
What They Did:
- Orange is a Telecom service provider (like Airtel). They wanted to increase awareness about RCS & improve adoption.
- The company targeted 6 African nations during the African Cup of Nations in 2019, a popular soccer tournament (the 3rd most popular one in the world).
- Orange launched a conversational chatbot via RCS that gave users live updates about every aspect of the game.
The Results:
- The company promoted the bot via SMS, Socials, & Traditional channels as soon as it went live.
- Their developers worked quickly to improve the chatbot based on real-time feedback, adding features like player profiles & team updates as needed.
- Orange outright doubled the number of RCS users, generating 1 million messages during the tournament. 33% of users had an average of 25 interactions with the bot.
Using Celitix’s custom, pre-approved bots & white-label solutions, aggregators, telecom agencies & marketing professionals can integrate custom solutions to fulfil the needs of all their campaigns.
The CPaaS platform offers turnkey communication solutions that empower companies to connect with their target groups like never before.
How RCS Business Messaging Works?
To start off, RCS Business Messaging in India works in two ways:
- Push: Promotions, OTPs & Updates that are broadcast to a database of users.
- Push & Pull: Programmable bots that provide automatic conversational experiences.
Think of the Push RCS feature as how SMS marketing is done today. It is one-way communication that functions as a broadcast. You can still automate by setting up your workflow and selecting a trigger for every approved message.
Push & Pull RCS feature uses agents, triggers, pre-approved messages & keyword-based responses to communicate with users. Let’s break these down:
- Agents: These are bots that connect & communicate between your team, RCS servers & end-user devices. Celitix provides various pre-approved & custom bot solutions to meet your organisational needs.
- Triggers: Set events that begin a conversation or launch a message. It can be the send button on your Celitix dashboard or app, a specific time, or an inquiry by the user.
- Approved Messages: Being an official channel, every RCS message has to be approved by the governing telecom agency of the area to ensure adherence to lawful practices.
- Keywords: Most RCS automation works through keywords. For example, if the user’s message contains the word “address”, the bot will reply with the business’s physical address; for “price”, it can share a catalogue, etc.
By using an integrated CPaaS platform like Celitix, you can easily add RCS to your current communication systems. Leverage the revolutionary power of automated conversations to sell, convert & scale your business like never before!
Why Is It “Google’s” RCS Business Messaging?
When RCS was first introduced by GSM, the original model for its adoption was similar to SMS & MMS:
- Network providers (like Airtel) would learn about the technology
- They will invest in the necessary infrastructure to offer it to their users
Unfortunately, this model was never implemented due to a perceived lack of demand, high costs & competition from OTT platforms. That’s when Google took it upon itself to bring RCS to the masses.
- In 2015, Google acquired Jibe Mobile & used its telecom infrastructure to offer RCS to the world
- With it, Google allowed worldwide Network providers to offer RCS to their customers without having to invest in it themselves
- Instead, any carrier could utilise Jibe’s cloud-based infrastructure for the technical requirements of offering RCS to their customers
Due to this telecommunication service model, RCS Messaging is closely associated with Google Messenger. The same is true for RCS Business Messaging, which is a solution developed by Google.
Think of it like WhatsApp. The whole platform is owned & operated by Meta. While users can download WhatsApp for personal use, WhatsApp Business is a specialised solution for brands. Both are managed by Meta.
Conclusion
In today’s world, the modern communication ecosystem evolves to meet technological advancements and demand fluctuations. Over time, the pace of change will likely accelerate.
Instead of feeling intimidated by change, partner with Celitix to welcome it with open arms! Moreover, leverage every tool at your disposal to ensure success.
Get ahead of your competition & strengthen your brand image with omnichannel communication. Explore more of our guides to learn about the best use of every channel & how they all fit together.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q1. What is RCS Messaging?
RCS (Rich Communication Services) is an upgrade to SMS/MMS, offering advanced features like rich media sharing, read receipts, typing indicators, and group chats.
Q2. How does RCS differ from SMS and MMS?
Unlike SMS, RCS allows for richer media sharing, larger file sizes, and real-time indicators, providing an experience closer to apps like WhatsApp or Telegram.
Q3. What is RCS Business Messaging?
RCS Business Messaging (RBM) is a communication tool that allows businesses to send rich, interactive messages to customers directly through their native messaging apps.
Q4. What are the key benefits of RCS for businesses?
RCS Business Messaging includes rich media sharing, read receipts, typing indicators, custom branding, chatbots, verified sender profiles, interactive buttons, and rich cards. As a result, this enhances customer engagement, furthermore, builds trust, improves brand image, and ultimately, saves time for companies.
Q5. Is RCS better than OTT Messaging apps for business?
Yes, RCS is integrated directly into the phone’s native messaging app, eliminating the need for downloads or account creation and making it more accessible than OTT apps.
Q6. Is RCS better than SMS marketing?
Yes, RCS offers real-time communication, multimedia sharing, larger file limits, and smart features, making it far more interactive and engaging than SMS.
Q7. Can RCS be integrated with existing business communication platforms?
Yes, RCS can be integrated with platforms like Celitix to streamline workflows, automate messaging, and provide a seamless omnichannel communication strategy.
Q8. Should I use RCS Business Messaging?
Yes, you should consider its benefits. It provides a more engaging and interactive experience than SMS, allowing businesses to share multimedia content, automate responses, and build customer trust with verified profiles.
Q9. What kind of content can businesses send via RCS Business Messaging?
For instance, businesses can send high-resolution images, videos, documents, product catalogues, promotions, and, additionally, interactive message cards with call-to-action buttons.
Q10. How can I start using RCS Business Messaging?
Businesses can integrate RCS Business Messaging through platforms like Celitix to manage messaging campaigns, automate customer interactions, and analyse engagement metrics. Furthermore, reach out to us for support.
