Trust is a critical foundation of customer engagement, with 71% of customers saying that they’ll stop buying from a company altogether if their trust is broken. As a business, establishing trust is a non-negotiable to ensure your customers are actually paying attention.
Interestingly, our 2023 research unveiled a significant consumer preference: 35.6% expressed their desire to receive mobile messages with promotions. However, some estimates indicate that spam texts are increasing by 157% year over year, and complications can arise when subscribers don’t recognize a business’ sender information and they may mistakenly label messages as spam. Businesses must strike the right balance between promotional outreach and preserving trust to avoid being categorized as spam and ensure a positive customer experience.
Enter Rich Communication Services (RCS) with a simple solution: verified senders.
In a world where your customer communication strategy hinges on trust, RCS can step in to instill confidence, cementing the bond between your messages and your audience. Trust matters, and RCS is here to make sure it’s rock solid.
About RCS and verified senders
In RCS, live chats that include multimedia (think a web browser, maps, and other images) can take place between businesses and the user directly in their native messaging app. Currently, RCS is only available on Android devices, but Apple has announced they’ll embrace RCS sometime in 2024.
More and more brands are gravitating towards RCS and it’s experiencing exponential growth – in fact, brands sent 25,000x more RCS messages in November 2023 than they did in February 2022, and we expect that number to continue rising.
In addition to the growing popularity of RCS, verified senders could be a crucial reason that people engage more with RCS than other messaging channels. Verified senders are embedded in the RCS Business Messaging protocol and verify whether your business as a sender is entitled to use the name and logo that are shown to the final recipient in your message’s UI. They give your business a stamp of approval from a specialized entity like a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) to help assure your customers that the messages in their mobile inboxes are from a legitimate, trusted source.
After a business has been verified, recipients will see their logo at the top of the conversation, as well as an official brand name, brand color, and a distinctive checkmark – all visual cues that the messages come from a trusted, genuine source.
The visual assurance of a verified profile serves as a powerful signal for users, minimizing the risk of messages being mislabeled as spam and reinforcing trust.
Advantages of RCS verified senders for businesses
Let's dive into some of the major advantages that verified senders bring to businesses that want to build and keep customer trust.
Legitimacy
If you’re sending mobile messages, you’re probably concerned with them feeling legitimate and genuine to your customers – they need to help you build and maintain trust across every interaction.
Whereas many brands may still worry about being marked as spam, verified senders help alleviate those concerns. The process of verification by a Verification Authority (like an MNO) indicates to your subscribers that your messages are coming from a legitimate, trusted source – your brand!
Enhanced brand recognition
The moment a user opens your message is crucial: In a split second, they should be able to tell who the message is from, what the message is about, and whether they want to hear from you again (or if they should mark your message as spam).
Here, RCS verified senders can play a critical role in these first moments by providing consistent and recognizable branding across your messages, laying the foundation for a memorable brand experience.
Consider the scenario from Picard, a French food company specializing in the manufacturing and retail distribution of frozen products. Using RCS, Picard is able to include their familiar logo, official brand name, and consistent color scheme across all messages so that their customers can focus on choosing their holiday menu rather than on who the messages they’re being sent are from.
Watch the video to learn how Picard used RCS to deliver a personalized, white-glove customer experience during the busy holiday season.
This approach helps them facilitate more meaningful interactions, elevating Picard’s brand identity with every message sent – resulting in a 42% increase in customer engagement from RCS messages as compared to Rich SMS.
Improved user experience
As a user, engaging with a verified sender profile ensures a trustworthy interaction. That's because RCS helps contribute to a sense of familiarity and authentic connection.
Let’s take the case of Macif, an insurance company with close to five million policyholders, as an example. They leaned into RCS’s high open and engagement rates to enhance user experience.
Macif used RCS to drive user engagement and a positive customer experience.
Their campaign results demonstrated an immediate and significant improvement in user engagement, achieving a 100% increase in click-through rates as compared to Rich SMS campaigns and tripled engagement levels as compared to email campaigns.
Macif’s verified sender profile undoubtedly removed some of the common barriers users face with mobile messages from brands, like the uncertainty of a number from an unknown source. By doing this, Macif subtly removed obstacles and enhanced its credibility!
Reduced fraud
When your customers know who their messages are being sent from, they’re more likely to meaningfully engage. Verified senders can step in to give your audience clear, visual indications that they’re speaking with the right brand – and, equally as important, when they’re not!
Beyond visual cues, verified senders’ authentication process for brands to use it makes it an ideal candidate for anything that requires the exchange of sensitive information, like in two-factor authentication (2FA).
How to implement your RCS sender identity
When you think about getting started with a new messaging strategy, the thought of managing RCS with its own integration and maintenance might cross your mind.
That could be why many businesses that want to embrace a rich messaging future start with an easy solution: Auto-upgrading existing SMS messages to RCS where it’s possible and maintaining SMS where needed. This is certainly the easiest option if transitioning to a new API isn’t feasible, or backend systems being intricately tied to SMS.
Working with an SMS provider to help send your messages makes the process easy and can help you start sending messages as soon as possible. For example, here’s a rundown of how easy it is to set up your sender agent to start sending RCS messages with Sinch:
|
What you need to do to send RCS |
Estimated time |
|
Decide to deploy an RCS sender |
Varies |
|
Fill out enrollment form (2 pages) with basic information like:
|
< 1 day |
|
Test messages for approval |
< 1 day |
After we get your enrollment form, we’ll need to set up an RCS sender agent before you can send RCS messages, which includes the following steps:
|
What Sinch needs to do to set up an RCS sender agent for your brand |
Estimated time |
|
Create and register your RCS sender IDs |
24 hours |
|
Configure and apply the service |
48 hours |
|
Obtain operator approval to send production traffic |
Up to 14 days |
Total time to set up RCS Sender Agent (e.g., time needed to send your first RCS campaign): 3-16 business days
Get started with your verified RCS profile
Proactively embracing RCS is about more than modernizing your messaging strategy; it’s about strategically building trust in your brand, making sure your messages are delivered, and reducing spam.
RCS’ robust authentication process makes it ideal for businesses that are seeking to enhance customer relationships. With RCS, you can not only align with the evolving landscape of rich messaging but also establish your brand as a trustworthy one.
Ready to get started with RCS? Download our comprehensive RCS guide which will walk you through how to make the case to bring RCS into your organization.
Or, if you’re ready to build a messaging strategy that your customers will love and trust, let’s chat. Our team is excited to help you with conversational messaging and RCS!
