A Brief Overview of Rich Messaging
Along with Eminem and Auto-Tune, text messaging was just becoming really popular back in the halcyon days of the early 2000s. It was a simpler time, and all our texts were sent via “short message service” (SMS), which was mostly confined to words. This was cutting-edge technology back then, and since we weren’t yet expressing ourselves with walls of hieroglyphic emojis or GIFs from Schitt’s Creek, it was all we needed.
Today, this is no longer the case. We’re spending much more time communicating with each other through text messaging and sending much more complicated information, to boot. In response, rich messaging was developed.
Technically known as “rich communication services” (RCS), rich messaging is the next step in the evolution of text messaging. It allows for better use of interactive media, such as high-resolution photos, messaging cards, audio messages, emojis, and GIFs. Even more important for those of us in the contact center industry, it also facilitates an enhanced customer experience, with things like sensory-rich service interactions.
Capabilities of Rich Messaging
Having covered rich messaging, let’s explore some of its vistas. While this is not a comprehensive list, it reflects what we believe to be some of RCS’s most important properties (especially from the perspective of those looking to leverage text messaging for contact centers).
Integrating with Other Services
Today, the rise of generative AI is changing how contact centers work, which also presents an opportunity for integration.
If your business is looking to integrate AI assistants to automate substantial parts of its customer service workflow, you’re almost certainly going to have to do that through rich messaging.
Secure Messaging and Transactions Processing
Big data and AI have both raised serious concerns over privacy. A decade ago, people wouldn’t have thought twice about sharing their location or putting pictures of their kids online. These days, however, more of us are privacy- and security-conscious, so the fact that rich messaging supports end-to-end encryption is important.
People are much more likely to talk to your customer service agents directly if they can rest easy knowing their data isn’t going to be exposed to malicious actors.
Better Analytics
Speaking of big data, rich messaging makes it possible to gather and conduct fairly sophisticated customer service data analysis. You can gather statistics about obvious metrics like reply rates or feed conversations into a sentiment analysis system to determine how people feel about you, your company, and your service.
This allows you to identify patterns in customer behavior, optimize your use of AI, and generally start tinkering with your procedures to better serve customer needs.
It also goes the other way, inasmuch as you can send real-time alerts confirming an issue was received, updating a customer on the status of a ticket, etc. Sure, this isn’t technically “analysis,” but it’ll help people feel more at ease when interacting with your customer service agents, so it’s worth bearing in mind.
Rich Channels of Communication
Where can you use rich messaging? In the sections that follow, we’ll answer this exact question!
WhatsApp is a platform overseen by Meta (formerly Facebook) that supports rich text messaging, voice messaging, and video calling. With more than two billion users, it’s incredibly popular. A key reason for this is that all this data is sent over the internet, obviating the SMS fees that used to keep us all up at night. And it has a business API that will allow you to scale up with increased demand.
Apple Rich Messaging
Apple’s rich messaging service is called Apple Messages for Business. It offers potential and existing customers a way to communicate with your agents directly via their Apple devices.
This is a market you can’t afford to ignore; with nearly two billion Apple devices, the reach of iOS is simply gigantic, and it’s a communication channel you should be cultivating.
Google Rich Messaging
More than nine out of ten searches happen on Google, meaning that it has become the powerhouse when it comes to finding information online. And if that’s not enough to convince you, consider that the phrase “Google it” is now just what people say when they’re talking about looking something up.
However, you may not be aware that Google offers a Business Messages service that should be part of your overall customer strategy.
Building Trust through Rich Communication Service Messages
Being successful in business requires many things, but one of the more important ones is trust. This has always been true, of course, but it’s only become more so with the rise of artificial intelligence.
We’ve been singing the praises of generative AI for a while, and firmly believe that it will have a huge positive impact on the contact center industry. But there’s a downside to the fact that it’s now trivial to crank industrial quantities of text, video, and images.
There’s always been plenty of nonsense online, but once upon a time, the ability to create such content was limited by the fact that someone, somewhere, had to actually sit down and make it. That’s no longer the case, which means that users are more eager than ever for signs that they’re dealing with customer service they can rely on.
Rich messaging has a part to play in that, and in the next few sections, we’ll explain why.
High-Quality Interactions Will Have Customers Coming Back
Rich messaging has many tools that make it easier to ensure that customers have a first-class experience interacting with your contact center. The rich messaging services described above have APIs, for example, that allow you to better organize conversations. This means agents can stay on top of their workloads, leading to less of the kind of frustration and distress that might negatively color their replies.
These services can also be integrated with high-quality conversational AI platforms. When agents can outsource simple, standard queries to algorithms or reuse snippets, they have more time to focus on solving trickier problems.
The net result is that agents feel less burned out, and customers get better help, faster.
Consistency in Experiences
Another way to build trust is to ensure your style is consistent across channels. Just as you wouldn’t use a different logo on Facebook and Instagram, you shouldn’t use a dramatically different tone of voice on one platform than you use on another.
When people know what to expect from you, they’re more likely to trust you. Because rich messaging supports many different kinds of media, you can ensure that customer experiences remain consistent.
This is also a place where generative AI comes in handy. The best conversational AI platforms train models on the conversations of senior agents and make this available to everyone in the contact center. This means that each agent can format replies with the same empathy, patience, and understanding as their very best peers.
Verified Business Profiles
Finally, using a verified account is a basic step you can take to increase trust. If you thought getting junk mail was bad, pause for a moment and consider the absolute barrage of text messages, bogus phone calls, and DMs most of us get every single day. There is a never-ending sea of bot accounts on Twitter and other platforms trying to dupe everyone into one crypto scam or another, and this has substantially eroded people’s trust in online interactions.
The rich messaging services offered by Google, WhatsApp, and Apple all have a fairly lengthy process for verifying the authenticity of your profile. By itself, this isn’t going to ensure that customers trust you, but it helps. People want to know that they’re talking to a real business, not an imposter; the “proof of work” (speaking of crypto) required to verify a rich messaging account is a crucial part of establishing that rapport.
Rich Messaging is the Future of Text
The world today looks very different from the world of the early 2000s. Our technologies, including our text messaging, have evolved along with it, and businesses have to keep up if they want to remain relevant.
Rich messaging is a great way to build trust and loyalty, and it opens up many new opportunities. But to get the most out of rich messaging, it really helps to work with a platform that offers robust tooling, language models, analytics, and so on.
Quiq is one such platform. Reach out to us to schedule a demo, and see how we can ensure your text-messaging outreach is profitable, productive, and easy!
