How can brands prepare for RCS?

If you follow our blog or are into telecommunications technology, you’ll be familiar with Rich Communication Services (RCS). Since Google acquired Jibe and launched the early access program, RCS has taken the fast lane and it’s now been launched by 58 operators in 40 countries, with the UK, France and Spain anticipating the roll out in late 2018. In our part of the world, we have Telstra offering RCS to its customers in Australia and Vodafone offering the service in New Zealand. Plans from other telcos to adopt the service have yet to be announced, but for businesses this is a good time to start thinking about how you can enhance your customer experience with Rich Messaging.

SMS Landing Pages – stepping stones to RCS

Jumping from text-only SMS to Rich Messaging is a big step, so for businesses it’s essential to experiment and learn what kind of content and media would add value to their customer experience and receive the best response. That’s why we’ve introduced SMS Landing Pages so that businesses can get a headstart in the Rich Messaging journey with features like the following:

• Enhance messages with rich content such as images, videos or QR codes
• Drive customer engagement via call-to-action buttons
• Provide personalised content and offers to each recipient

When a customer receives an SMS Landing Page, they will be presented a page that is dedicated to a single message that the business wants to convey, with actionable steps to follow.

RCS-ready platform

When we developed our Rich Messaging Studio for SMS Landing Pages, we took a future-proof approach to allow users to use features that are supported by the GSMA Universal Profile 2.0.What that means is when RCS is available via all networks in Australia and New Zealand, all messages created as SMS Landing Pages can automatically be converted into RCS messages, and be delivered directly into the recipient’s default messaging app, which is where they are receiving SMS today. Since the availability of RCS depends both on the network and the handsets, there is always a chance that some customers are using handsets that do not support RCS. Our system will automatically check if RCS is available at the recipient’s end, and send the messages as an SMS Landing Page message if RCS isn’t available. This allows businesses to embrace Rich Messaging without having to worry about designing different messages for the same content.

Explore the endless possibilities

There is so much potential for brands to transform customer engagement with Rich Messaging and we’ve touched on some benefits businesses can see with RCS. Earlier on this year our team was invited by Google and GSMA to the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona to help demonstrate how RCS can be used to enhance the business messaging experience. Much has happened since then as we delved further into this technology to understand how this can be applied to different industries. We will be showcasing these latest developments with use cases and demos on RCS and SMS Landing Pages at the Retail Experiential Show on 29th – 31st August in Sydney. If you are going to be at the show, don’t forget to come by and find out more about these exciting new products. Otherwise, please get in touch as we’d love to assist your business to embark on the Rich Messaging journey today.