Twilio has announced the global availability of Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging via its Programmable Messaging and Verify APIs.
RCS is the next evolution of SMS messaging and has gained significant enterprise traction this year after Apple announced its support for the service as part of its iOS 18 update in June.
It builds upon conventional SMS messaging by allowing users to augment messages with various forms of multimedia, including videos, GIFs, audio, and more.
As such, sales and marketing teams that leverage Twilio’s API can create more compelling content to send via text. Such content could well enhance the success of their outbound campaigns by bolstering metrics like first-time transactions and repeat purchases.
Yet, Twilio enables further customization options alongside the rich communications features consumers have experienced when using messaging apps such as Messenger and WhatsApp. These help to verify a business’s messages.
For instance, Twilio allows companies to add their names, logos, and taglines to messages. Additionally, the vendor provides them with trusted sender verification by Google and “read receipts”.
All this will help customers to trust that the message has come from the real brand, not a fraudster, and increase “positive” customer engagement.
Meanwhile, it also lowers “negative” customer engagement. This is where customers reach out just to make sure the message they’ve received isn’t a scam.
Such “negative” engagement is not something to overlook. Indeed, in 2022, Gartner found that two-thirds of customers contact customer service after receiving a proactive message from a brand “often using costly assisted channels”.
Typically, this is because they feel like they need additional information. However, ten percent of B2C and 24 percent of B2B customers follow up to confirm that the outreach isn’t a con.
Branded RCS will remove many of these unnecessary contacts to customer service teams – which come with considerable costs – while closing that trust gap.
“At Twilio, we believe building engagement with your customers should be as seamless and trusted as possible,” added Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio Communications.
RCS makes this a reality by delivering richer interactions, improved deliverability, and most critically, building trust in your brand, without changing a single line of code.
That ability for a business to configure its RCS brand and sender verification via the Twilio Console – without adding those lines of code – is a differentiator for the CPaaS Magic Quadrant leader. Indeed, Twilio allows its customers to start sending out trusted communications quickly.
Additionally, Twilio manages the carrier relationship and provides tools to ensure messages default to SMS when RCS isn’t available.
Thankfully, because of that Apple announcement, those occasions will be rare. That news paved the way for businesses to bolster their customer contact strategies via RCS with interactive carousels, call-to-action buttons, location sharing, and quick reply options.
Leveraging such features, businesses that have switched from SMS to RCS within their customer contact strategy have experienced a 32 percent increase in customer engagement and conversion rates – according to Futurum Research.
After noting this, Paul Nashawaty, Practice Lead for Application Development and Modernization at Futurum, stated:
Twilio’s latest announcement makes sense, focusing on RCS solutions to help drive value for their customers. This is likely due to RCS’s ability to deliver richer, more interactive content, such as images, videos, and buttons, which can enhance the customer experience and drive higher ROI.
As CPaaS sits on the back end of Twilio Flex – the vendor’s CCaaS solution – RCS may soon become available on the platform.
That follows a period of rapid advancement for Flex, which seems to be an integral part of Twilio’s future after the vendor moved it across from Segment to its more successful Communications business.
Meanwhile, in July, Twilio announced that it will soon add a mobile app, “personalized IVR”, and a new speech analytics solution to the platform – as covered by CX Today.
