The U.S. is the last major market on Earth still stuck with SMS

Rich Communications Services: verified, visual, and measurable

The U.S. is the last major market on Earth still stuck with SMS – you know – Simple Messaging Service – SMS. 
 

Those gray bubbles that have a few blue links – and that come from some random 5 digit short code or telephone number. 
You know – there’s so much confusion over those messages because we’re never really sure that the sender is who they say they are. 

Did you know that’s not how people communicate in the rest of the world? I do a lot of work in Latin America and Europe, and they are surprised to learn that we still use SMS as anything more than a communication channel of last resort. 

In the early 2010s, apps like WhatsApp and other messaging apps, introduced rich features; things like product carousels, embedded payments, and customer service chatbots. Features that feel more like a mobile app or a mobile website than a text message. And ever since, the rest of the world has been shopping, booking, and banking inside these interactive experiences. 

So why are we so far behind? 

Well, it comes down to being able to both send and receive a rich message. 
 

And in the US, the carriers couldn’t send an RCS Message because they didn’t want to invest in the infrastructure until most phones could receive one. So it was a chicken and egg issue, and it was Regulators that finally broke the inertia that drove the Adoption. The US government put tremendous pressure on the cell phone manufacturers to include RCS enabled upgrades in their operating software, and once they did, the telecommunications upgraded their infrastructure. 

That means the way customers connect with brands on mobile devices hasn’t changed in decades—until now. 

So, upgrading to rich communications isn’t an if… it’s a when that’s been a long time coming. By 2028, over 50% of messages will be sent via RCS. 

The future of customer experience is unlocked and it’s already in your customer’s pockets and purses. 

And in the next few minutes, I’m going to show you the future of Rich Communications. 

There are lots of Rich Communications channels, like WhatsApp, Apple Messages, WeChat – and lots of others. But today we’re going to focus on Rich Communication Services, and Apple Messages for Business and that’s because they are new innovations that have recently launched right here in the US. 

RCS is the next generation of SMS. Think of it as branded messaging, with app-like interactivity built right into the phone’s native messaging inbox. No downloads required. 

Most folks in the US are just receiving RCS messages for the first time. So, if you haven’t seen what RCS looks like, then perhaps a video is worth a thousand words. We’ve prepared some examples of how a financial services company, and a retailer are using it. So, let’s take a look! 

Upgrading messaging from SMS to Rich Communications is much more than just copying and pasting your existing text messages into a newer look and feel. This is an opportunity to significantly improve the Customer Experience by re-imagining it. Here’s how. 

My team and I picked just 7 specific benefits out of hundreds that we could have shown to get you thinking about the art of the possible. 

Let’s start with the basics. RCS and Apple Messages for Business offer a new look and feel because they’re branded and secure. Messages come from a verified sender, and you’ll notice that your logo, colors, and brand identity are prominently displayed next to this checkbox here indicating that your brand is verified by the carrier. No more random short codes or telephone numbers. Customers can trust that it’s really you via these visual cues that are similar to the way a secure certificate shows up on a website. 

Then, there’s frictionless forms. If you remember one thing from my presentation it’s this: Rich Communications allows customers to “Tap, not type.” “Tap, not type…” Imagine pre-populated fields where your customers confirm their data, and never need to re-enter it. 

One of the biggest factors in selecting technology platforms are the robustness of their respective ecosystems and how easy it is to integrate with the rest of your tech stack. And since rich messaging has been widely adopted basically everywhere but North America, it already connects seamlessly to native phone features, like the location features, payments, calendars, the mic, and camera. But the ecosystem is more than the Apple or Google app store. It’s got to be able to transcend data silos and connect via open APIs with your entire tech stack, your ERP, CRM and Marketing Cloud platforms. 

And it does. There’s a number of means and methods to be able to connect with your customer data and media platforms to offer personalization at scale to increase Customer Lifetime Value. 

On every metric Rich Communications outperforms SMS in terms of customer engagement, NPS, churn, and improvements in customer acquisition costs. 

Because customers are already used to engaging in conversations on their phones, the extension to layer on Agentic AI and conversational experiences is already enabled. 

And your data and financial stewards are going to be enabled to turn customer insights into actionable intelligence through improved messaging analytics. You can do things like track campaign attribution to mobile checkouts done via messaging.   

Notice the branding. For something as simple as an overdraft alert, that makes a world of difference in a world filled with smishing and phishing attacks. 

Use Frictionless Forms and send personalized loan offers or credit card offers to customers in ways where they can act on it with one tap and engage with forms that your CRM is pre-populating for them. 

Proactively leverage Infobip’s Open APIs and native integrations with your customer support tools, like your CRM or ServiceNow to send transactionally based triggers – things like fraud alerts, overdraft protection, claims updates or product deliveries can be sent in real-time via secure messaging. 

SMS analytics only capture if a message was delivered and if a link was clicked. But RCS captures everything.   

RCS turns this mortgage campaign into an instrumented, interactive flow: rich cards capture timestamped postbacks (“New Mortgage” vs “Refi”), letting you auto-trigger and re-trigger the right journey immediately or months later from the user’s inbox—so analytics become real-time intent signals that drive automated conversions. 

Use faceted search and interactive product catalogs that show personalized offerings and hyper-relevant products based on previous purchases and your customer data. These tools can help customers find products in new ways and recommend the right parts or products given what you already know about them. 

Improve Operational Efficiencies by integrating seamlessly with native phone features like the map, the microphone, the camera, Apple Pay and Google Pay for a truly connected customer experience that blows away what you can do with SMS. For example, you confirm an address and send a picture of the field services repairman prior to them arriving to ensure that your customer will be at home for the service visit. 

Manage routine customer service requests using conversational agents to conduct inventory lookups at the local store in the mall. 

Invite shoppers to browse products and if they abandon their shopping cart, send an incentive and reminder to help them return and complete their purchase.  Give them an option to ship or buy online and pick up in store, connect inventory to local store stock and even have them pay using Apple Pay.   

Early adopters are already seeing engagement rates 3x higher than SMS. As in terms of conversion rates that were 50% better than the same SMS communication. 
Whether you’re concerned with top of funnel improvement, middle of funnel, or bottom of funnel, we have use cases for each. 

• India’s largest fintech had a 130x improvement for click through rates over SMS. 
• T-Mobile had a 120x improvement over SMS in their conversion rates 
• And Papa John’s had 23 times higher sales compared to SMS 

And this is just the beginning. Once you are engaging with your customers in their messaging inbox, these solutions are the unlock to enable agentic AI via chat.  They open up a two-way “conversational commerce experience” that culminates in a payment, and of course, they power “customer service experiences” that are highly personalized based on a 360 view of the customer’s profile. 

Infobip is the leader in this space and they’re a unicorn with operations in over 90 countries. They just surpassed more than 10 billion messages sent via RCS globally. And we at the Lima Consulting Group are one of their top partners.  We’re a global Customer Experience consultancy and I founded the company to help the visionaries of today create the customer Experiences of tomorrow. 

What we showed you here are a composite of real use cases. Typically we conduct a workshop to identify and assess your current use cases using design thinking principles. In the workshop, we will start by doing a fun exercise to mutually agree upon decision criteria for your use cases. 

Together with your team, we typically build out 12-36 use cases within the one-day workshop using our methodology which we’ve improved over the past 21 years. This is an example of one of the posters we will do in the workshop to get the use cases on paper in a collaborative way. 

We then take the use cases back to our workshop, score each use case, and place them in an effort to impact matrix. 

From there we build out the customer journey maps, screen flows, process maps, the data flows and data architecture and then we’re able to design and deploy the re-imagined “to-be” customer journeys using rich communications. 

Can we do a workshop to get you started? We’ve got a starter package for taking your first SMS journeys to the future. 

The future of customer experience is to meet the customer where they are at. Let’s talk about how you can launch your first RCS use case in 90 days.