In a world driven by instant messaging, where in most cases, everything is as simple as just typing a text and hitting send, the tools that help us connect to one another are transforming at a remarkably fast pace. While SMS and MMS have been the traditional pillars of mobile communications, there is a new player in town – RCS, an acronym for Rich Communication Services.
RCS is the next generation of messaging, promising a richer and more interactive experience than traditional messaging. To discover this, in this blog, We define what is RCS? How does it work, and why is it the next thing in messaging?
What is RCS?
RCS actually stands for Rich Communication Services, which means it is an expansion of the standard SMS, or Short Message Service, with additional features that exist in popular applications related to messaging. In essence, you may think of RCS as SMS in extreme ways, such as having multimedia, receipts, typing indicators, and beyond—compounding the user experience of the simple text message. Essentially, RCS hopes to close the gap between traditional SMS and advanced messaging applications such as WhatsApp, iMessage, and Facebook Messenger.
RCS means more than sending and receiving text messages—it is capable of sending users’ high-resolution pictures, videos, and audio files; allows group chats; lets users read and see when the respondent is typing a response to them or even just reading their message. It’s a protocol that works between different networks and devices to become the universal solution for enhancing communication.
RCS and Google: Putting Up a Driving Force
One of the bigger players working to make RCS a reality has been Google. With an eye fixated on bettering mobile communication, Google has been one of the major stimulators behind RCS as the ‘SMS successor’. It adds an RCS capability within its Messages app, pre-installed on a host of Android devices. This would mean a smooth messaging experience for all Android users with features so much like those one can find on popular chat apps.
It’s all part of Google’s larger strategy for combining messaging on Android. By touting RCS, it wants to develop for Android a uniform, feature-rich messaging experience that will not depend on the device or the carrier. The move is actually one big step toward a more or less consolidated messaging environment where users don’t need third-party apps to have advanced messaging features anymore.
But it hasn’t been an easy road to wide acceptance for RCS. Despite it being deployed across many of the carriers around the world, one of the most challenging factors has been getting all of the major carriers and device manufacturers on board. At this point, there are still some stragglers, and it has significantly limited this rollout.
Apple and RCS: Will They or Won’t They?
The biggest question facing RCS, however, is whether Apple will ever support it. Today, Apple’s messaging world is dominated by iMessage, which includes most of the features RCS promises: read receipts, typing indicators, high-quality media sharing—the list goes on. For this reason, though RCS has been around for years, Apple has been dogged in not supporting it and providing its users with a way out of iMessage.
This means that without Apple RCS support, there is a big obstacle to mass adoption. Where the iPhone is more popular in places like the United States, for example, lack of RCS support on Apple devices means even Android users reliant on RCS still have fragmentation when they are communicating with iPhone owners.
This fragmentation can result in non-optimal user experience, and therefore messages would not entail the rich features when transmitting across platforms.
Not all hope is lost, given the current scenario. There is a small hope that Apple may eventually start supporting RCS. The technology has been developed to act as a universal standard. So, its application by Apple can, in turn, amalgamate the messaging experience in every device, facilitating smooth and efficient communication among people.
RCS in the UK: The RCSengland Movement
The push toward RCS adoption is getting more and more exposure within the UK through RCSengland. The primary objective of the movement will be to communicate and propagate the multiple advantages associated with RCS to customers and businesses and further elaborate on how technology could enhance communication and lead to better engagement.
RCS has turned out to be a very potent way for businesses to reach customers with rich, interactive messages. While traditional SMS was bound by text and simple multimedia, now with RCS, businesses can create visually rich messages—images, videos, buttons, and even QR codes—to create newer and richer forms of marketing campaigns, customer support, and more.
The RCSengland initiative also takes into account the consumer education benefits from RCS. The movement raises awareness of such features and the improved experience to cause a shift—so more people are able to experience this next-generation messaging technology.
Benefits of RCS to Consumers and Businesses
One of the many strong suits of RCS is its richer communication suite. For consumers, this means a much more delightful messaging experience that includes group chats, high-quality media sharing, and even live updates around message status. These features elevate messaging to the level of popular chat applications, but they are native and do not require end-users to download more applications.
RCS, therefore, opens a new chapter for customer engagement in businesses. By allowing the sending of media, buttons, and links, as well as the acceptance of rich content, RCS messaging holds a powerful ability for marketing. This will allow sending offers, appointment reminders, or customer service messages for businesses in a better way than a simple text message.
Besides, RCS is now a two-way channel, and customers will get the opportunity to reply to messages and have real-time conversations with business brands. This will increase satisfaction and foster closer relations between brands and customers.
The Future of RCS: Challenges and Opportunities
While RCS comes replete with quite a number of benefits, there are still a few challenges lurking that need to be tackled to get it into the global standard of messaging. The most critical challenge here is the fact that RCS does not support every device and network. As stated earlier, one missing feature here is the support from Apple to remove it completely from the shadows as a cross-platform solution.
This is not to say that other challenges still present, such as the fact that full RCS support has not been achieved by all carriers worldwide and that network standardization still lags somewhat globally. In other words, what this implies is that if in some other parts of the world, RCS is being adopted slowly, it creates fragmentation and eventually discrepancies in its user base.
Despite all these challenges, the future of RCS looks bright. As more carriers and device manufacturers adopt the technology, awareness of its benefits will grow and, in the future, it could even become the standard default in mobile communication. Offering ever more unified and smooth user experiences with messaging across the globe can be realized using RCS.
Conclusion
In other words, RCS marks an important milestone toward improving mobile communications. RCS radically changes the nature of how we might communicate not just professionally but also personally because it inherently offers a richer, more engaging experience than traditional texting. For businesses, RCS is set to offer another serious frontier for customer interactions and results.
We, the Benchmark Group, know it’s vitally important to be right at the top of a communication technology curve. As RCS gains even more popularity worldwide, we continue to fully dedicate our time to helping our clients leverage this next-generation messaging platform to further enhance their marketing strategies and make more meaningful connections with their target audiences.
This is a time to get really excited about Rich Communication Services if you are a business wanting to realise the full potential or an interested user wanting to know what the future holds for messaging. The future of messaging has arrived in a way that is more exciting than ever.