Month: August 2021

Until a few years ago, email and SMS were the primary ways to send out business messaging to customers. However, the proliferation of smartphones and the internet have transformed the “business to consumer” communication landscape. From email and SMS, now we have social media, messaging applications and instant messaging all set to influence business messaging.

The digital impact on business messaging

The business messaging landscape is also witnessing rapid evolution as customers become more informed and digitally savvy. As the smartphone becomes an extension of the customer’s life, business messaging has become more refined, contextual, and sophisticated. That apart, along with the ubiquitous SMS, new mobile messaging technologies are becoming a part of the business messaging ecosystem.

Business messaging continues to rise in prominence and importance owing to the growing adoption of digital marketing solutions. With the era of notifications and alerts upon us, enterprises across the globe are looking to deliver quality information regarding their products and service offerings to their potential customers in a medium comfortable to both – the customers and the enterprise. This has been a major contributor to the incremental rise of A2P communication especially for enterprises as they vie to build customer loyalty, boost customer interaction, and build stronger customer relations.

Channels of business messaging have also proliferated because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. As more businesses moved online, the need for effective and efficient communication and customer engagement services only increased.

Email marketing, once a very popular and preferred channel for business messaging has slipped down the popularity ladder. Customer inboxes are usually flooded with offer-related emails, making the discovery of relevant information harder consequently leading to low opening rates. Text messages and SMS’s, comparatively experience greater reachability. Gartner reports that “SMS open and response rates as high as 98% and 45%, respectively — in contrast to corresponding figures of 20% and 6% for email.”

This is further expected to contribute to and drive A2P SMS market growth

Enterprise A2P SMS services also continue to rise in prominence for business messaging as it is highly popular amongst startups and small enterprises. Lower costs associated with A2P SMS continue to be a major attraction along with increasing numbers of smartphone and internet users.

SMA retains its power

While SMS still continues to be a powerful business messaging channel, businesses are looking out for technology options that make SMS more engaging. Business messaging too is looking to access functionalities like embedded images, video buttons, animation, suggested replies, etc. readily available on consumer applications. RCS or Rich Communication Services (RCS) builds on this potential by helping businesses achieve truly engaging messaging experiences and bring about a messaging evolution.

Taking both SMS and RCS into account, the messaging industry is expected to grow from 1.55 trillion messages of A2P traffic in 2018 and to surpass the 2 trillion mark by 2023.

However, in the business messaging landscape, despite new developments, SMS technology is set to maintain its important position despite messaging apps continuing to vie for market share. This is especially so as email, though a preferred mode of business messaging, usually ends up in spam folders and has low read rates.

Instant messaging is still navigating regulatory waters as they can be available only as downloaded apps. Since these companies are usually outside of the regulatory control of local governments, enterprises are wary of depending on them and especially for critical functions.

While RCS looks like the most probable candidate, ensuring how to use it to best interact with the customer and get the best cost while doing so is going to be the next frontier to navigate.

Navigating the security landscape

The conversation about the changing dynamics of business messaging is also incomplete without speaking of security. Along with ensuring the quality of communication, maintaining consumer trust using strategies such as two-factor authentication and employing firewall solutions will gain momentum. The use of blockchain to further encrypt messages can bolster the security posture. However, the regulatory chasm still remains to be crossed. As such, it hardly comes as a surprise to see research predicting 3.5 trillion SMS business messages will be sent in 2023 – an increase from the estimated 2.5 trillion in 2019. The focus on A2P messaging will continue to be the preferred enterprise medium to communicate with the customers.

In Conclusion

Voice, premium, instant messaging, SMS, OTT, white route messages, and grey route messages, both, constitute a massive opportunity for telco players and service providers – either to identify opportunities or to evaluate gaps that cause revenue and customer trust to leak and dissipate. While they explore new and potential opportunities that drive profit, building and maintaining customer trust by proactively maintaining a great security posture becomes critical. Elements like Network protection, building trusted, carrier-grade, real-time communications across IP network borders to enhance security, performance, and reliability will contribute to customer retention and revenues. A new world of business messaging is already here.

Pete Cashmore, CEO and founder of Mashable once famously said that attention is the new currency. Every business is vying for the customer’s attention. In a world where the average consumer is glued to the smartphone, the mobile has become the new battleground for brands in this quest for customer connection.

Businesses reach out to customers through various channels such as social media platforms, Facebook messenger, and instant messengers such as WhatsApp. However, contrary to what some may believe, SMS communication is still alive and thriving. That said, if the aim is to connect and engage, businesses need to think beyond sending plain text SMS. They need to send rich texts to gain customer’s attention. Enter RCS!

Rich Communication Services (RCS) create messaging touchpoints that are more engaging and provide a rich experience to customers. RCS adds that value in Application to Peer (A2P) SMS.

No wonder brands are willing to spend $18.04 billion on RCS.

RCS enables businesses to send multimedia and experiment with different types of content such as hyperlinked texts, rich images, and even polls and quizzes through A2P SMS.

The results are evident too. According to mGage’s research, RCS achieved a 14 times higher engagement rate and a better response rate than other methods used previously.

While businesses are expected to benefit from RCS, how do mobile operators stand to benefit from it?

Let’s delve into the subject to know more.

How Can Mobile Network Operators Benefit From Rich Communication Services?

1. Better customer experience

With the help of rich communication services, businesses can send high-resolution pictures and heavy files to their customer contacts, share locations and add emoticons and features to their messages to make them more interactive. Such messages will improve customer engagement by virtue of being more interesting and inviting. Businesses can also brand their messages to give them a distinct identity. These features enable mobile operators to strengthen their connection with the customer by being consistent across all the channels they use to communicate. This is a remarkable difference from the current fragmented experience offered to them. Most importantly, the transition from SMS to RCS is seamless. Studies show that customers are already overwhelmed by the number of channels being added to the ecosystem. They don’t want to download an additional messaging app to interact with businesses. However, RCS does not require the customer to download another app. They are automatically upgraded to RCS. So, they can leverage the benefits provided by apps like WhatsApp and Signal from the default messaging app available on their smartphone.

2. New revenue-generating opportunities

RCS provides a unique opportunity for mobile operators to generate more revenue beyond their traditional revenue channels. Businesses are forever on the lookout for new digital channels to reach out to new and existing customers. Some channels are effective, while some do not offer the kind of ROI expected. For example, a banner ad generates an average of 0.1% CTR. As SMS is more personal and sent to the in-built messaging app, the CTR and open rates are much higher. Add to that the power and engagement of RCS and the brand campaigns promise to outperform by 207%. According to Gartner, the interoperability of SMS and its better reach to customers makes it an extremely viable marketing channel for businesses. They know that it’s a channel that customers will use regularly. In fact, operators are expected to generate $52.5 billion from RCS messaging by 2028.

3. Improved customer retention

Some messaging platforms have come under the scanner due to data privacy concerns. SMS and RCS are still considered safer options as they are known to protect customer’s data by default and are permission-based. This helps businesses to communicate safely with their customers and retain them. Apart from helping businesses, RCS messaging can also be useful for mobile operators to retain their customers. Instead of sending plain text SMS to their customers, operators can send rich communication with capabilities to enable customers to respond to messages. They can use rich templates to create brand recall for customers. Most importantly, they can reduce customer churn by creating an engaging and consistent experience for customers across the entire communication ecosystem the customer uses.

Conclusion

RCS provides many benefits to both businesses and subscribers. The future of RCS messaging looks positive as carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are planning to embrace RCS from 2022. Also, considering that SMS is still the most used form of communication in many countries and does not require an app to be downloaded, RCS messages have a scope to reach out to more customers than the new messaging platforms.

However, there are also a few shortcomings, such as both the network and texting apps must support the protocol. Otherwise, the customer might not be able to use RCS across all networks. Also, some regions such as Europe and France are still slow in adopting RCS. The other bottleneck in adoption is that only 8.9% of global mobile networks support RCS messaging.

Unless these challenges are resolved, businesses and operators cannot realize the full potential of RCS. However, operators can partner with trusted solution providers to optimize the usage of RCS messaging and gain a competitive advantage.

To know more, contact us.