Karine Terzibachi on RCS and the Future of Mobile Commerce Messaging

1. What are the key features of RCS that enable more interactive and personalized customer engagements in mobile commerce?

RCS enables more interactive and dynamic experiences in many ways including:

1) A branded thread: all messages are sent from a verified thread with the  brand’s name and logo. RCS effectively pre-loads a brand’s contact card or profile into the messaging app; building immediate visual trust with the recipient. The days of needing to download a contact card are over. 

2) Interactive features like suggested replies and actions can enable conversations between brands and consumers as they shop at scale.

3) Rich media (carousels, videos, pdfs, files etc) give marketers exciting new options to engage with customers.

Today all marketing messages include a link sending users to the website to shop. The most critical part of the online shopping experience happens on the website, but websites are very hard to personalize. RCS's rich capabilities enable bringing shopping into messaging, extending the personalized experience through the entire journey. But RCS alone will not drive performance. Combined with AI, RCS Business Messaging creates a new interface of mobile commerce and communication where messages can now be personalized to every individual consumer's needs.

2.  In what ways can brands utilize RCS to create richer, app-like experiences within messaging platforms? ​

RCS can help create personalized shopping experiences along every path of the journey: from discovery, preference collection, understanding customers are shopping for, browsing, cart management and checkout in the messaging app directly.

Using a product drop campaign as an example, brands can now leverage carousels to highlight new products and identify customer preferences using suggested replies / actions.

Brands can also leverage functionality like RCS videos to highlight educational content, brand partnerships / collaborations and more!

3. What role does RCS play in the broader context of omnichannel marketing and customer communication?

RCS levels the playing field between text and other marketing channels, that are all media rich and more interactive.

Text has historically been the channel to unlock 1:1 personalization at scale, but SMS / MMS capabilities have always been limited to text and small images (<500KB). RCS enables sending media up to 100MB in size enhancing the text exchange from a stale, black & white experience, to multi-color full HD interactions aligning with other channels (i.e. email, social).

RCS also has the potential to unlock two-way messaging at scale, with suggested replies substituting typing for tapping. Given the real time nature of text, this would be much more difficult to enable on other marketing channels.

4. What metrics should brands focus on to measure the success of their RCS-based campaigns?

In our latest consumer survey, 90% of consumers said that they are more likely to make a purchase when interacting with a brand using at least one RCS feature. This can lead to higher response and conversion rates, reduced cart abandonment, and improved post-purchase experiences that build loyalty and ultimately higher revenue.

Attentive customers generated $29 billion in revenue last year alone, and on average they experience more than 2x return on investment with our AI-driven platform. We strongly believe, and early testing results confirm, that RCS Business Messaging will supercharge those results.

5. How does the integration of multimedia elements in RCS messages impact customer engagement and conversion rates?

We strongly believe that performance gains will be driven by unlocking more personalization using RCS rich media capabilities, and we are still in very early days of testing to determine the impact.

Many consumers have a higher affinity for rich media and consume content through videos, carousels etc already. Some people are heavy instagram users, others are heavy X users. RCS will finally enable catering to the former audience using the text channel.

6. How the evolution of RCS impacts the future development of mobile messaging standards and consumer expectations?

Currently, mobile messaging capabilities in the U.S. are trailing the experiences available in Asian markets facilitating shopping in messaging. RCS is a major step forward that will enable us to get closer to that experience. RCS is the next global standard for SMS and MMS, and as the only marketing company on the CTIA board, Attentive is playing a key role shaping the future of RCS alongside Google and major carriers. We’re thrilled to be in this unique leadership position to help our customers operate at the forefront of this exciting new technology. As our CEO Amit Jhawar said at our launch, "Attentive isn’t waiting for the future—we’re building it."