RCS chat is a much recently upgraded messaging protocol designed to be the successor of SMS. It is a highly interactive, rich, powerful, engaging business communication channel.
The RCS market is valued at $2.3 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow with a CAGR of more than 24% between 2025 and 2032.
The rapid growth in RCS messaging is evident amongst businesses and marketers.
RCS messaging protocol features enhanced messaging activities, including:
- Ability to read recipients
- Multimedia capabilities
- Branding
- Typing indicators
- Suggested replies and actions
- Not limited character
Companies can connect with customers worldwide using RCS business messaging, leveraging rich features to create memorable conversational experiences.
This not only drives high customer satisfaction but also improves brand loyalty and conversation rates.
In this article, we introduce you to the RCS chats and what they can do for your business, exploring its potential in business communication and marketing.
Table of Contents:
What Is RCS Messaging?
RCS messaging is an enhanced IP-based messaging protocol upgraded from SMS with interactive and rich features.
It allows businesses to send “rich” messages, which refers to text messages with multimedia and other additional features.
They even have features like using pre-filled templates and quick reply options, carousels, and sending high-quality images, PDFs, and other media files.
Also Read: RCS Messaging: Every Terminology You Need To Know
What Is RCS Chat?
RCS chat simply means the conversation including one or more than RCS messages exchanged between two recipients.
What Is RCS Business Messaging?
RCS business messaging (RBM) is the application of the RCS messaging protocol used by businesses, which allows them to communicate with users through RCS chats to achieve their communication or marketing goals.
The objectives vary and can range from simple, like sending shipping notifications, to complex, like helping customers place a custom order.
Utilising interactive and rich RCS features like rich cards, multimedia, and suggestions, businesses can achieve a fluid, natural, and engaging conversation for better customer experience and satisfaction.
Also Read: Ramp Up Your Business Communication: Embrace RCS Business Messaging Today
How RCS Business Messaging Works?
RCS Business messaging ensures the flow of conversation between the brand and prospect, which must be conversational and natural and mimic real-life interactions.
Personalised interaction between your brand or agent and the customer increases engagement and improves customer experience, leading to great customer satisfaction.
With RCS business messaging, only your agent can initiate the conversation with the customer or prospect. Users cannot start the conversation but can respond at any time once the agent initiates the RCS chat.
After receiving the pre-programmed trigger set in earlier, the agent sends the first message to the prospect or customer.
Depending upon your campaign, you can set the trigger to be anything such as :
- A Customer raised a ticket
- A package gets shipped
- The user reached out to chat support
- Special offers every week
In order to send a message to prospects or customers, businesses must require RCS business messaging API from a reputed cloud communication platform like Route Mobile.
Our RBM solutions allow companies to create, streamline, and manage their RCS campaigns with our advanced features for A2P messaging. Here are some of the top features and benefits of our RCS messaging:
- Personalised experience
- 2-way communication
- Up-selling and cross-selling possibilities
- Rich promotional campaigns
- AI/ML-based chatbot integration
- Fallback as SMS
How Does RCS Chat Help Enterprises In Business Communication?
RCS offers enhanced messaging features that help companies achieve more engaging and impactful communication and marketing
Here are RCS chat’s top features and benefits, allowing business to enhance their communication significantly:
Increase Character Limits
SMS messages are limited to only 160 characters, making it an impactful and convenient messaging format. However, it can be limiting at times as well. With RCS texts, there is no character limit.
Enhanced Security
Top business service providers like we at Route Mobile ensure the security and regulatory compliance of the business to develop recipients’ trust in the brands.
Hence, our verified messages services for RCS campaigns make your text appear ‘branded’ and come from an authentic source, driving better customer engagement and trust.
High-Resolution Multimedia
Make your messaging more engaging and rich by using attention-grabbing, high-resolution images, videos, carousels, GIFs, and numerous other multimedia and dynamic options.
Group Chats
RCS also supports dynamic group chats, offering more group management features. It is quite similar to apps like Messenger, where you can create, name, and manage groups for a seamless experience.
Ability To Read Receipts
Unlike SMS, but similar to modern messaging platforms like WhatsApp, it allows the person to read the recipient of the sent message. It displays the word “read,” confirming it has been seen by the recipients and the time when the message is being read.
Indicate Typing
RCS chat offers real-time typing indicators to show when someone is writing their response. It makes the conversation more engaging and interactive since there is a sense of progress and anticipation in the conversation.
Conclusion
As experts predict, RCS messaging will entirely replace SMS in the not-so-distant future. It unlocks an opportunity for businesses to leverage this uprising trend in business communication and start adapting.
To grasp and exploit this technology to its epitome requires technical expertise, industry experience, and infrastructure to accommodate robust automation for consistent RCS messaging campaigns. And such conviction enterprises can only expect from a reputed business service provider.
We at Route Mobile offer RCS business messaging (RBM) solutions to create, streamline, and optimise RCS campaigns for higher ROI. Start today and connect to our expert team!
FAQs
How Is RCS Different From SMS?
RCS messaging is an upgraded form of SMS designed to replace it. Unlike SMS, RCS doesn’t have character limitations.
It offers rich and advanced messaging features such as sending high-res multimedia, reading recipients, seeing when someone is typing, sending files up to 100MB, and more.
Does iOS Support RCS?
iOs doesn’t support RCS at the moment. However, at the WWDC24 in June 2024, Apple confirmed that RCS messages will soon be supported in their messages app in the upcoming iOS 18 update in 2024.
What Are The Benefits Of Using RCS Business Messaging?
The biggest advantage of RCS Business messaging is the ability to access rich messaging features, including multimedia, typing indicator, read receipts, increased character limit, group chats, and more. Also, two-way communication further contributes to its enhanced conversational experience, boosting engagement and customer satisfaction.
