Esendex has joined Google’s early access program for RCS Business Messaging – but what’s that, and how does it affect you?
A brief overview of RCS
You might have heard us talk about RCS before in our RCS explainer blog post, but if you haven’t, here’s a recap.
RCS stands for Rich Communication Service and is designed to be the next evolution of SMS.
While SMS has served us all very well for a long time, it hasn’t really evolved all that much over the years. Third-party messaging apps can offer much more – and cool features like group chat and media sharing have become things that we now expect as standard. Compare this to SMS, which only really offers plain text, and well – you can see why the upgrade is happening.
What can RCS do?
We’ve been particularly excited about the ways our customers will be able to use RCS for quite a while now. Businesses will be able to communicate with their customers in completely new ways by using things like geolocation services, buttons, appointment booking facilities, calendar integration and tools which make it easier to make purchases.
The functionality RCS provides also allows businesses to send much more engaging content than they have before. As well as being able to add their own branding and colours to messages, businesses will be able to send things like tickets, bills, promotions and reminders in an interactive message. All of this aims to lead to a better customer experience, and better conversations between businesses and their customers.
What is the Google RCS Early Access Program?
The program is an opportunity for a select group of innovative and forward-thinking mobile service providers to be ahead of the curve with RCS, influence the future development of the platform and start to build with, and learn about the technology.
This means Esendex will be among the first to be able to offer RCS to our customers, and create branded, interactive multi-channel/omni-channel messaging experiences by combining RCS with our existing channels.
How will this benefit Esendex’s customers?
The great news for our customers is that because we’ll be among the first to start developing against/ experimenting with the platform, our customers will be some of the very first to benefit from the new proposition.
We’ll also be able to advise our customers about the ways we anticipate they can each maximise the potential of RCS specifically for them. We’re particularly excited to explore the ways RCS can increase engagement/conversion of messages by making them richer.
We have an exciting development roadmap, and we’re excited to already be working with a variety of different companies, to find new and inventive ways for them to communicate with customers using RCS.
If you’re interested in knowing more about RCS, or how Esendex can help you design, develop and implement an RCS communication strategy, please don’t hesitate to contact our team on 0345 356 5758 or at [email protected].
