RCS vs SMS for Brands: What 1.2 Million Messages Taught IHG

When I hosted a fireside chat on RCS vs SMS for brands, the conversation moved well past channel definitions and into the practical realities of deploying rich communication services at enterprise scale.

I sat down with Carter Calle, Director of Messaging at IHG Hotels & Resorts, and Alex Allemand from Google, who brought real deployment experience to the table. What emerged was less a product overview and more a decision-making framework for customer experience leaders who are done waiting on the sidelines. Here is my recap of what they said and why it matters.

IHG Hotels & Resorts: Google RCS results at a glance

IHG’s messaging program didn’t start with Google RCS for Business. It started with offering customers the option to text instead of wait on hold. The response was positive so IHG added Apple Messages for Business and WhatsApp as channels. But once they added Google RCS for Business and it became available on both iOS and Android,  it quickly became IHG’s fastest-growing channel. The numbers and guest feedback tell a clear story.

1. Volume and growth

Carter was direct: “We did 1.2 million messages last year” on Google RCS for Business and IHG’s three-year forecast expects significantly more. RCS is scaling faster than any channel before it.

“RCS is quickly becoming our fastest growing channel,” Carter noted, with Apple Messages for Business currently holding the top spot only by virtue of a longer head start.

2. CSAT scores

The satisfaction gap between RCS messaging and traditional channels isn’t marginal. 

“It is several percentage points higher than both web chat and voice,” Carter said. He was clear that it’s not about agent quality. “It’s not like we’re going out and recruiting Harvard grads to be our messaging agents.” Both messaging and voice are“the same pool of agents… they all have the exact same tools, the exact same policies.”

The lift comes from the channel itself.

3. Operational efficiency

IHG has grown headcount as volume scaled, but not proportionally. As Carter put it: “We don’t have to add headcount at the same rate that volume’s coming in.”

Asynchronous messaging lets agents handle genuine concurrency in a way voice never could.

4. What leadership thinks

Carter’s summary of internal reaction: “This causes a-ha bells to go off over and over again. We don’t have to pitch them very hard on this. They see the value of Google RCS for Business immediately.”

Why have this conversation now?

For most enterprise brands, RCS messaging was a “watch this space” technology—interesting in theory, perpetually not-quite-ready in practice. That changed. 

When I brought together Carter and Alex for this fireside chat, our goal wasn’t to introduce Google RCS for business as a concept. It was to have a practitioner-level conversation about what it actually looks like to deploy it at scale.

Apple’s iOS 18 changed the calculus for enterprise brands

The single biggest accelerant for RCS business messaging adoption in the US wasn’t a carrier rollout or a Google push. It was Apple. 

As Alex explained during the webinar, Apple’s recent move toward supporting RCS was “a gamechanger in markets like the US, where you’ve got 50% market share or more of Apple devices.”

Before that, RCS for business was largely an Android story. After it, iPhone users and brands with US-heavy customer bases suddenly had a credible path to branded messaging that worked across nearly every mobile device—without asking customers to download a new messaging app.

The state of RCS adoption: What the data actually shows

RCS represents a shift that’s no longer nascent. Alex noted that Google has been investing in the messaging protocol since 2015 and that adoption has accelerated sharply over the last two years.

IHG’s own trajectory reflects this: RCS messages are already their fastest-growing messaging channel, and Carter expects it to surpass Apple Messages for Business in volume as more entry points come online.

Brands like Nespresso have also reported 3.7x higher conversion rates compared to equivalent SMS marketing campaigns. United Airlines and Thrive Cosmetics are already visible in a consumer’s native messaging app with fully branded RCS agents.

The question of RCS vs SMS for brands has moved from roadmap to active messaging strategy. 

To quote Carter, “SMS remains useful, but its limitations—anonymous short codes, no branding, no interactivity—make it a poor foundation for the kind of digital-first experience customers now expect.” The brands showing up in this conversation aren’t evaluating whether to adopt mobile messaging; they’re figuring out how fast to move.

Quote callout: “We constantly get inquiries from market managers in other countries asking when it’s coming to their town. So there’s a lot of hunger for it. There’s a lot of desire for it.” – Carter Calle, IHG

Key differences: SMS, RCS, and the gap between them

Our session didn’t spend much time on channel definitions for their own sake. Instead, Alex and Carter used their real deployment experience to explain what RCS and SMS actually mean when you’re running enterprise-scale customer communications.

SMS: Why 30 years of reliability still matters

Carter was candid about why IHG started with traditional SMS: it was accessible, proven, and easy to launch. They introduced it through their IVR as an opt-in alternative to a phone call, and it worked. Volume grew. The use case for text messaging was validated. But SMS’s simplicity hit a ceiling fast.

Carter named the specific breaking point: “The interactions happening on a short code that has no IHG branding doesn’t really inspire customer confidence. And it’s really hard to go back and find that interaction later because you don’t necessarily remember that a six-digit code was your conversation with IHG.”

Google RCS for Business: Deliver trust

With Google RCS for Business, brands operate through a verified “agent” which is a persistent presence on the mobile phone, complete with logo, verified sender ID, and full message thread. 

Alex described it as your brand being “front and center” rather than hiding behind a generic short message service code. This persistent inbox presence is a meaningful structural difference from channels like web chat, where the conversation disappears.

Where short message service hands customers a six-digit code, Google RCS for business surfaces a verified brand profile. Carter noted that fraudsters can’t replicate that and for IHG this resolved a real problem: Guests simply didn’t trust text only messages from anonymous numbers.

Carter explained the full picture: “It’s happening in an IHG-branded window. There’s a check mark next to the IHG brand that basically Google has verified that this is IHG — similar to sometimes you see in Twitter a little blue thing that says this person has been verified. The fraudsters don’t have a certified-by-Google check mark next to their logo.”

Businesses need solutions that are native, verified, and persistent so that a good first experience creates a branded beachhead.

The feature differences that actually move the needle for brands

Carter identified three traditional messaging limitations that actually hurt the guest experience: 

1. No brand recognition
2. No interactive elements
3. No analytics

He put a point on this: “Even our customer satisfaction survey — if you want to give us a score between one and five, you actually have to type out ‘five.’ You can’t just hit a button that says five and submit the score. It’s just a bit archaic. That’s not what customers want to do.”

And Alex reinforced the analytics issue: SMS works for delivery, but reporting is inconsistent across cellular networks, while Google RCS for Business gives brands read receipts, response rates, and typing indicators.

The real question isn’t RCS or SMS

One of the sharpest moments in the webinar came when the conversation stopped being about mobile communication channels entirely.

Carter and I both landed on the same point: Brands that frame this as an RCS vs SMS decision are solving the wrong problem. The right question is whether you can deliver a continuous, context-rich experience regardless of which messaging channel a customer happens to be on.

The hotel guest experience: A case study in channel-agnostic CX

Carter walked through a scenario that made this concrete:

A guest flies overnight, arrives at the Intercontinental Park Lane at 7am, and wants to check in early. IHG’s vision: an outbound RCS business messaging note that says “your room is ready” the moment it becomes available, perhaps including multimedia sharing of the room view. That’s a seamless guest experience delivered over a mobile device.

“If the room does become available more quickly, we would love to proactively send you message that says, ‘Hey, your room is ready.’ Or maybe the front desk says, ‘Your room’s not going to be ready till 3, but I have a slightly larger room,it’s only 30 euros more a night, and I can give that to you right now.’ So we’re seeing those kinds of possibilities  which could result in an upsell opportunity,” Carter said.

What ‘continuous context’ means in practice

I described what Quiq does underneath all of this: Hold context regardless of the data networks used.

If someone starts searching on Google, continues on RCS messages, and then calls, the history travels with them. And Carter confirmed IHG sees this play out—customers return to a dormant message thread days later and pick up exactly where they left off.

RCS and SMS: A practical comparison framework

Our conversation didn’t spend much time comparing RCS to see if it was simply “better.” The more useful question is where each channel earns its place.

Feature-by-feature comparison: What brands need to know

When SMS is still the right call

SMS continues to be the universal fallback. For markets where carrier support is still growing, or for users on older mobile phone models, SMS works as the connective tissue. Carter acknowledged IHG still offers SMS messages and likely will for some time to ensure they deliver messages to everyone.

When RCS earns its place in the stack

Google RCS for Business wins when trust, self-service, and re-engagement matter. Carter described SMS interactions as “archaic” — customers had to type out “five” to submit a CSAT score rather than tapping a button. That friction compounds at scale. RCS removes it.

Conversational AI and asynchronous messaging

One of the more clarifying moments for me was when we shifted to how the whole thing holds together. The RCS vs Apple vs WhatsApp debate looks like the wrong argument once you understand the strategic layer above it.

Carter said that the reason IHG’s scores outperform voice is the nature of asynchronous interaction. A guest can send urgent messages, get distracted, and come back and the conversation doesn’t disappear – they don’t get a frustrating ‘session ended’ message. .

Carter elaborated on what makes the asynchronous model so different: “People are  OK waiting around when they can  do their own thing and multi-task. The phone’s great at notifying you when you got a new message coming in  so you don’t miss it. There’s nobody who’s going to end the conversation because you didn’t respond immediately.”

And on what that means for the channel overall: “Who doesn’t want to do stuff at their pace? Why do we want to be beholden to what other people think the pace of our interaction should be?”

I explained how Quiq holds context so the customer never has to repeat themselves. . Whether a guest needs appointment reminders, urgent notifications, or transactional messages, the AI agent or human agent picks up a continuous thread. Carter called this out directly: “You mask all this complexity for our agents.”

Key features: What enterprise brands should do with RCS for business

One of my favorite things about this conversation was the logic Carter and Alex shared with us. For brands working through the RCS vs SMS question, the answer depends on your readiness to operationalize:

1. Assess your audience: IHG’s WhatsApp investment made sense for Latin America. RCS for business made sense for North America because there are many more iOS phones. 
2. Start with clear wins: In Carter’s words: “Don’t start with Google RCS for business out of your call flow. It does not show well. On the other hand, featured snippets lit up our executive team. If you’re starting out, do featured snippets, show it to your execs. They will love it. Once you’ve got executive leadership bought in, somehow those other things start to kind of fall into place pretty quickly.”
3. Build for continuity: SMS messages get a message delivered. RCS messages create a branded presence.

Carter’s strategic framing captures the long-term opportunity: “More than one of our senior leaders has realized that from a Google search to an interaction, we now have a branded IHG foothold on the customer’s native messaging app. People would kill to have that. As long as a customer doesn’t delete that conversation, the next time they’ve got a question and they had a good experience, they’re not even going to bother looking for the telephone number — they’re just going to come back and find that conversation and start a new one.”

Brands that invest in customer notifications and AI-powered infrastructure won’t be caught flat-footed when they finally replace SMS with richer interactions. RCS represents the future, but your strategy should be ready today.I loved hosting this webinar with Alex and Carter! If you missed it, you can watch the full webinar here.