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How RCS business messaging transforms communication
RCS gives businesses new ways to communicate with customers, clients and business partners. Learn how to ensure your RCS and unified communications strategies mesh.
There's no question that Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging has changed the way we communicate. But the technology, first developed more than 40 years ago, is showing its age. Users are ready for something more robust.
Enter Rich Communication Services (RCS). The standard, defined by the GSM Association, is promoted as a replacement for legacy SMS communications. Where SMS is limited to text and simple images, RCS business messaging supports interactive features, rich media and improved security.
Let's examine how organizations can use RCS to better interact with their clients and business partners.
Strategic benefits for customer experience
Does your organization seek to improve customer satisfaction and retention? RCS helps accomplish that goal. Consider the following basic RCS features:
- Users can send and receive rich media, including photos, videos, GIFs and files, without installing additional apps.
- Group chats offer more advanced capabilities than traditional text messaging can handle.
- Interactive capabilities include branded messaging and one-tap actions such as purchasing, dialing or viewing a map location.
- RCS network and device support occur at the carrier level.
- RCS systems encrypt data by default and offer sender verification to mitigate spoofing and fraud, increasing user trust.
Standard SMS text messaging cannot compete with these advanced features. RCS also beefs up unified communications (UC) by adding value and reducing complexity by enabling mobile-first communications and supporting emerging mobile technology, like 5G networking.
Integrate RCS with existing technology
RCS integrates with your organization's existing infrastructure and current initiatives, including the following:
- AI chatbots. RCS works with AI chatbots to offer structured conversation flows, rich media and smooth handoffs to human agents. RCS lets companies extend the benefits of traditional computing platform-based chatbots to mobile users.
- UC platforms. RCS simplifies UC deployments by offering predictable unified messaging for both iOS and Android users.
- CRM. Tying RCS messaging into a CRM platform streamlines the exchange of information between customer interactions and CRM records. Another benefit: Companies can automate rich-media messages that deliver personalized alerts, reminders, sales events, promotions and other customer engagement communications.
Practical steps to integrate and implement RCS
The following practical steps highlight how to best integrate RCS into an existing UC platform.
- Evaluate your organization's readiness.
- Select a provider suited to your business needs, including direct integration products, third-party providers and cloud services.
- Register with your provider as an RCS business messaging agent. Registration includes verification of your brand, increasing customer trust and recognition.
- Determine UC integration strategy, including API connectivity or integration into your existing UC platform.
- Design rich, interactive messages that align with your organization's goals and requirements.
- Define security configurations, including end-to-end encryption (E2EE), secure APIs and providers that comply with industry-specific security requirements.
- Initiate a pilot program to test messaging and integration in a sandbox environment.
- Configure monitoring to track delivery, interactions, button clicks, performance and compliance.
- Gradually expand the deployment beyond the pilot program while supporting fallback to SMS messaging and other methods for unsupported devices.
- Collect and address user feedback.
- Examine monitoring data for performance and optimization opportunities.
Use the pilot program to bring IT leaders, UC administrators and marketing professionals together. Collaboration among key stakeholders strengthens the project, enables metrics and ROI measurements and overcomes deployment challenges.
Addressing RCS deployment challenges
As with any new deployment, RCS presents its own unique challenges. An RCS business messaging deployment plan must address the following potential concerns:
- Technical integration with existing communications methods and UC platforms.
- Issues with device and carrier support; however, these should decline over time as adoption increases.
- Onboarding delays with brand verification from carriers and providers.
- Cost of data usage, potentially as a burden to end-users.
- Compliance with data protection regulations, including those found in healthcare, finance, and similar industries.
- Encryption requirements as the RCS Universal Profile 3.0 specification includes updated mandatory E2EE standards.
- Data sovereignty concerns stemming from cloud-based UC and RCS.
- User education and trust.
Dedicate forward-looking resources to alleviate these deployment headaches.
Measuring RCS messaging outcomes
Your RCS deployment must include measurable benefits in customer experience (CX), retention, conversions and deliveries to provide a justifiable ROI. Consider tracking and acting on specific metrics, such as message delivery rate, fallback to SMS rate, system delivery failure rate, customer read/open rate, customer click-through rate, customer interaction rate, customer opt-out rate and customer spam/complaint rate.
Without these metrics, making any system adjustments to address customer and platform concerns is just guesswork. Prepare your organization for next-level communications and add RCS to your existing UC and CX platforms.
Damon Garn owns Cogspinner Coaction and provides freelance IT writing and editing services. He has written multiple CompTIA study guides, including the Linux+, Cloud Essentials+ and Server+ guides, and contributes extensively to Informa TechTarget Editorial, The New Stack and CompTIA Blogs.
