Welcome everybody to RCS explained the next generation of business messaging.
This is the first in a series of three webinars uh that we at TrueDialog are doing um uh as we are launching RCF to our prospects and customers.
Uh I am give me one second and so I’m Becky Banask. I’m in the middle here and I’m the VP of customer success.
So, my team and I have the fortune of working with uh some of you who are listening right now. Um and I’ll let my co-presenters uh introduce themselves.
I am Amanda McGuckin Hager. I am the CMO and CRO here at TrueDialog. I think sometimes in today’s day and age, I
And I am Sarah Haynes and I’m in product marketing here at TrueDialog and I’ve been working a lot with our product and
can share some information about our product but also RCS in general and understanding how it fits into the market and into your business.
So, one quick housekeeping note. Uh feel free if you’ve got questions, if you want to, uh post those questions. Uh we
will be watching for those and ask a few questions throughout and at the end. And if there’s anything we don’t get to,
we’ll make sure to follow up uh with answers to everyone as well.
just to get started because RCS is something that’s new at least here in the US. Uh Sarah, I would love for you
to uh talk about some of the acronyms or some of the things that might be new to people uh before we start to get down and dirty into uh the rest of the content.
Sure. And don’t feel like you have to learn these on this screen. These are the terms that you’re going to hear us use over and over again over the next
hour. Um RCS, I think, is is the most obvious one. We all know why we’re here.
This is rich communication service. This is the ability to send visuals and uh calls to action and clickable links and
all kinds of things in a message. RBM is really why we’re here today. This is RCS for business messaging. This is you as a
verified sender. Our next uh our next glossery item sending business messages to your clients or your prospects. Being
a vis verified sender is an amazing thing. It’s a little bit of work, but it means that you are always you, an authenticated identity, your logo, your
check mark. You can’t be mistaken for anyone else and no one can impersonate you. Um, so that’s that’s a really wonderful thing uh
RCS agent is that combination of being a verified sender and having an approved use case. And we’ll be talking about that a lot more today. You know, Sarah,
I’ll say that agent one is the one that is been most confusing to our team as we have been working on this because agent is one of those things um whether you’re
talking about AI agents, whether you’re talking about support agents, it’s just one of those terms that’s out there. And you know, in this case, we want to make sure people understand because it’s
something you’ll see uh when you go through the submission process, all of those types of things.
Yeah, Asian has a lot of different definitions in today’s world, doesn’t it?
It sure does. Yeah, it it has got many different meanings and this one is uh for for those who’ve been doing SMS
thinking about an RCS agent is also a very different kind of orientation. Um so lot lot to learn for for everyone in
this industry for sure. Um, we’ll also talk about the carriers. That’s you AT&T and Verizon and all the other um, cell
carriers who actually enable RCS delivery. And Amanda’s going to talk in a minute about those carriers and what it took to get us to this point where
carriers are supporting RCS in North America. Um, we’ll also talk about the carriers and Google as agent registrations, the people that that
actually approve you as a sender. And you’ll hear us talk about fallback messages. um the thing that means you don’t have to worry about going down the
RCS path because if somebody can’t receive RCS, they have an SMS backup. Uh so those are terms we will repeat and
define and explain in a lot more detail as we uh go through today’s presentation.
And also if you don’t remember them after the fact, know that when you’re working with my team to get up and running um that we’re here to handhold
you through that process. So uh so we’ll we’ll we’ll be here to help you through that as well. There will not be a quiz. I don’t think there’s the deck, right?
We’ll send the deck out to you if there’s um questions afterwards.
Yeah. So, why now? Uh I feel like I’ve heard about RCS for a while. So, so would love to hear why this is happening now.
Yeah. Do you want me to take this, please?
Um RCS is really interesting in that it is a global technology and it’s it’s been adopted in all of these uh yellow
countries for quite some time on this map, right? Um it’s an Android functionality. I think it started with Google um as their version of iMessage
if you will. Edit was launched globally and has been in um in process in market as you say for over 10 years in all
these other industries. Um, but why are we talking about RCS right now in the United States and Canada is um is the
story, right? In 2024, September 2024 with iOS 18, Apple agreed to support
Google’s RCS technology. That is a big deal. If you are familiar with the the carrier the device wars between the
iPhone and the Android phones um Apple at least here in the US has a large market share of the consumer devices. So
with the support of RCS it opened up this whole new world that we are all just getting to know a little bit
better. Um I I think is there anything else to share about why now? I think the the
other element of that is that the carriers with Apple agreeing to Apple and really Google working together on
this and uh working with the carrier networks the mobile carrier networks at least the three major ones which are Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile um to support
this functionality um through the device level and also through the carrier network uh brings us to where we are today. Um and
go ahead. Yeah. And this was huge for the carriers, right? So if you experience, you know, all of us experienced bumps in the road in this process. The carriers had to figure out how to support it, how to approve it,
what that process is going to look like.
So this is really a seismic change for the industry in North America.
Yeah. Not only at the carrier level and the device level and the technology level, but now for businesses, right?
And I think that’s why you’re hearing RCS. If you’re not hearing a lot of it now, you will be hearing a lot of it in the next uh coming
ahead because it is such a gamecher for the way businesses do business. And we’ll find out more here.
Yeah. And I’ll I’ll finish this off by saying that so we talked about when it got approved back in 2024. So since then
um one of the other things that’s happened is the way that they started off this pro process for those of you who have enabled RCS on
are starting to get some of those messages is starting with some of the Fortune 100 and starting to expand from
there. So the uh the brand approval process really started at the top and that is opening up which is another
reason why we get to start to talk about this now. Yeah, I think internally we’ve all been sharing the RCS messages that we’re getting as consumers. And I know
I’ve seen it from Walgreens. I think we’ve also seen it from Fidelity, uh,
FedEx. Um, it’s funny as we were going through this process internally working on this for the last year, maybe year and a half, every time any one of us got
an RCS message, uh, we were certainly excited and sharing it with everyone else of, look, we got another one. So,
it’s been fun. way too many screenshots of phones now and everybody else reading messages from because we get very excited about it and geek out about it.
I’ll admit for sure. And the only other thing I would add there is just as you see those gaps and you see that you know iOS 18,
this is where that fallback message comes in that we mentioned on the on the glossery screen there.
Some people don’t have the phone that supports it. Some people have a small region regional carrier that is not supporting it. So that is why we don’t
have to worry about those folks. They’re they’re going to get an SMS message.
Yeah. And we’ll talk about that here too of what what is a fallback message and and what do you do if your device doesn’t support RCS? But but first let’s
talk about what actually is an RCS message. So um I’m a marketer. I’ve been a marketer for over 20 years. Um, and
uh, I love this analogy of if an SMS text that you get from whatever business
you work with as a consumer um, is akin to a text email. If you are a marketing person, if you’ve ever built um uh an
email in any kind of email service platform, an ESP platform, you know that by default, a text message is I’m sorry,
a text email is created from the HTML email that you are working on to send out to your lists. Well, uh think of
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A text email is created from the HTML email that you are working on to send out to your lists. Well, think of
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SMS, the way that we use it and see it and receive it today. Think of that as like a plain text email. There’s not a lot to it. It’s a text and maybe some
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links. Period. Kind of the end. It’s limited to 160 characters etc. It’s pretty flat. RCS is much more like an
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HTML email in that analogy. It is dynamic. It is exciting. Think about when marketers got a hold of
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HTML emails and think of the creativity and the explosion of options that
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came into play when we started to have sort of drag and drop composers and we didn’t need to rely on
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developers to code our HTML email anymore. And this rise of the email service or email you know, the ESP, the
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service providers, and what it did for businesses is once businesses started to be able to send these HTML emails with
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the branding and the colors and all the content that they want to have in it and the modules… and just think about the HTML emails that you get today. RCS is
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very much like that. So, you can see why we are so excited about introducing RCS into the market. It is going to be really an exciting time.
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You know, I was there for that shift as well and it was a lot more fun to start receiving. I’m a good consumer in these sense and I’ve worked with retailers probably on the
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marketing side also for at least 20 years and it was a lot of fun getting to do other things alongside marketers as they got to get more into
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this or incorporating user generated content. There was so much that this opened up in so many layers. So, I’m extra excited to see this year as well.
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And if you don’t remember that, it’s okay. Not everybody on our marketing team remembers it either. So, that’s true. Awesome.
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Um so, we talked about what it is like.
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Let’s get into a little bit of the detail.
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Absolutely. So, I mean, as marketers discovered problems with email to kind of continue that email story, email had
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problems though, right? Things ended up in spam folders and they got blocked and there were impersonators.
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So, one of the things marketers started doing was more SMS, right? Where it’s delivered right away. We don’t have to wait for you to look through your email and maybe you open your email app and
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maybe you don’t. And those of you who don’t remember that email story, I know you probably don’t open your email very often either anymore. Um, so you know,
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the move became more and more to SMS. SMS became really popular, but boy,
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it wasn’t very fun for a marketer, was it? Or is it, right? It doesn’t have any of those creative elements. It
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was just… it’s either a long code or a short code and you hope that people recognize that as you and not as spam.
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It’s a text. It had all the advantages of “it pops right up on your phone and you click on it.” But that was kind of it. So, when we look at RCS, we have
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some really big differences. And the first one starts with that verified brand and check mark. I’ll kind of hearken back to that glossary slide
12:51
that we started with—that verified sender. It’s a big deal. It’s a hoop you have to jump through, but it means that when a message comes that’s an RCS
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message, your customer or prospect knows it’s you. It can’t be anybody else than you. And that’s something that not
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even email could do as well and SMS could not do either. And we’ll talk a lot about implementation in this session and in the next session. But
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one of the things that you’ll hear us say is “walk before you run, crawl before you walk.”
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Start with having all the advantages of making sure that the people who receive your messages know it’s you and not somebody else.
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Yeah. And I’m going to just jump in and share like SMS—I think a lot of companies still haven’t yet adopted SMS and are using it to its full
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potential. But if you are, then you know that SMS is sent through a phone number of two types. There’s the
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10-digit long code and there’s the short code. And what you see here on the screen is an example of a short code.
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The 10-digit long code… the industry has come really far. The 10-digit long code used to be able to be sent without any kind of registration.
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That has changed. You still have to register your 10-digit long code. There will be no SMS message sent without a
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registered phone number. The short code is a little bit of a longer process to get, but the throughput on that is
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much higher. You can send many, many messages kind of at the same time and be received at the same time. So really good for mass promotions, time-sensitive
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things like tickets going on sale for example. But those are the two ways to send an SMS message. What is so
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unique and different and what I personally had a hard time wrapping my head around is that an RCS is not sent through a phone number. It’s different.
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It’s not sent through a phone number. It is sent through this verified brand profile. And that is one of the unique differentiations between your standard SMS marketing promotions and the RCS marketing promotion.
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Yeah. Yeah.
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Um so and and that is the one thing that underlies everything about RCS—that they can see your brand actually go to a
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brand identification page and see that you’re you and that you know this goes to your website etc. It’s… go ahead.
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I guess we’re going to talk about that registration process right a little bit further in the presentation. We’ll get to that a little bit today and a lot more in
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session three. So, we’ll be hitting that one over and over again. Great. An RCS message is also more secure.
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It’s encrypted. And that’s something that’s going to be really important depending on what kind of industry you’re in. That may be very
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important and what kind of information that you’re setting. And then there’s that marketing creativity,
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right, that Amanda talked about. Being able to send media, have these carousels where you can have up to 10 cards of different images, different calls to
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action, different buttons. So much that you can test there and see what works best, what gets you the best response
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rate. You can have way more characters per message. You’re not limited to that 160.
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I want to just stop there. The 160 characters—every text message is limited to 160 characters. That’s why we
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use link shorteners over there on that side because every link, if you have a long link with UTM codes or
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reference tags or anything like that, your link can take up all 160 characters. So very sensitive to the
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number of characters. In fact, we did a study that is available on our website and learned that we surveyed a billion messages and what we learned is
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that marketers are really maximizing that 160 characters. They’re going right up to that limit
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as they should, right? As we hope them to do. However, with RCS, I think you get something like 3,000 characters.
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Now, if you were to send a 3,000 character text, I’m not sure how many people would appreciate that because you’re asking them to read a basic
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novel, but you have a lot more to work with on the RCS side, for sure. But you know,
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Becky, I was thinking about a call that I joined you on just the other day where a client was saying, “Well, you know, can we do this? Can we add this visual element?”
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You know, this graphic they were talking about emojis specifically. Now, what will that cost us? And I was thinking about how they had to think about that
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for every message cost instead of thinking what’s going to get the best response for our customers,
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what’s going to give us the response rate. This really shifts that thinking to what’s going to have the most value instead of “oh gosh, we’re going to
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go over our budget on a single message.”
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Yeah. Yeah. And Sarah, that’s super common that we are often advising people and having exactly that conversation—it’s probably one of the
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most common questions that we get is you know, “what can we do to get more efficient in what we’re sending?” and like, I can’t wait to blow that up.
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Yes. So much more fun to think about it this way. So much more value to your business. Right. Yeah, absolutely.
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And then in addition, the analytics—and again, we’ll talk about this more—but you know, as you want to know, you want to test what’s effective,
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you want to know what’s working. You want to know if your campaign is working. With RCS you can actually see whether your message has been read, whether
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buttons have been clicked on, whether there’s a response. So it really opens up a deeper understanding of what is
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effective for your customer, for your campaign in a way that we just can’t provide that visibility with
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with SMS. Yeah, it’s much more like an email, right? Where you can use a heat map and see in email anyway and
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see where what links have been clicked and how many times. Yeah.
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The other thing I like about RCS as a marketer is now you know, I think you can do it in Word and Google and
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every other business application is highlight some text and then insert a link. And that’s very similar to what you
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have in RCS. You have like here in this example “Schedule a campus visit”—that is a link, but in the SMS example you
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have to expose the URL. So, I know it is a very slight difference, but as a marketer and sitting in the marketing
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seat, it’s way more powerful to have sort of this embedded URL in a call
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to action as you do in RCS than you would in SMS where you’re just exposing generally a shortened link. That is kind of awkward and weird looking,
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right? So I think that I’m… that’s what I am most excited about is the call to action buttons in the RCS. As well as the creative, but yeah.
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Yeah,
19:55
I’m going to play the other side of that because like, okay, all of that is great. I don’t always get to work with the creative folks because you can see
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what’s on the left, right? But I am a geek about data and I’m so excited to have much more to work with,
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much more to benchmark and I, as Sarah knows, I feel like when I’m having conversations with people that we work
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with, the analytics comes up the most often. So, everybody’s excited about being verified, getting more traction
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from their brand. And what we end up talking about quite a bit is the analytics, the data. I mean, in this example, you have three calls to action
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on the right there. And you’ll be able to see on the back side of it which of those three was most popular, right?
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Which ones people clicked through and which ones they didn’t, which is incredibly powerful for driving your business forward.
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Yeah. And the ability to AB test those options, see what’s working.
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You know, you can do 10 images with multiple calls to action on a carousel.
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Is 10 good? Does that work best? Let’s find out what calls to action actually get the response that you’re looking for.
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You can test your images, right? Stock photos versus, you know, whatever animation or whatever else you want to test.
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Exactly. Exactly. So, so much for a marketer to sink their teeth into. Can’t wait. Can’t wait.
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So, speaking of which, yeah. So, you know, we’ve talked about SMS, we have really mentioned MMS, we’re talking
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about RCS… like everybody’s got these tools at this disposal. So, how how you
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know, Amanda, how are people going to think about this in their marketing stack, in their marketing mix?
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Yeah. So, this image is a brainchild of our own team trying to just wrap our heads around… the message type is what you see on the top
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above that line in each column. You have SMS, your standard message service. That’s 160 characters. You have MMS,
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which is a multimedia. So, that is… I’m sure you’ve all received these. This is a text message with maybe a picture
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included. And then you have RCS, what we’ve just been talking about. And the way that you can send either an SMS
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or an MMS is through a short code or a long code. We talked about that as well.
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Um RCS we talked about them being sent through an agent, but I do want to introduce this concept that there are two different RCS message types. So the
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first message type that you see is the RCS Rich. So what does that mean? That
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is akin to a branded verified sender
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sending basically a text message. It’s 160 characters with a link. It is a little bit cheaper from a send
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perspective to send an RCS Rich. It is also way less dynamic. So it could be great for that verified sender to get
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that trust, that credibility, that brand exposure, but it is also that flat message of 160 characters and a link.
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Period. The end. Then you have the RCS Rich Media which we’ve talked about with the carousels, the images, you can send
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videos, you can have all those call to action buttons. So you can see here from a trust perspective, it goes from
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low to high, right? Long code… when you look at the the market as a whole and you look at this message text
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message channel, long code is the lowest trusted, right? Because it’s also the most spammed. I don’t know if you have
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received any spam text messages. I keep getting one for fake tolls that they say I need to pay and when I open up the
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phone number, it’s a European phone number. I’m like, clearly this is not my local toll company. For me, somebody is
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tree trimming every day from a different number in your area, right? In your area. Yes.
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And so that long code does have… I would say from a trust factor it is one of the lowest of the three options.
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And then the short code, because the application process and the registration process for the short code is so
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much more in-depth. It’s a little bit longer. It takes anywhere between 6 to 8, sometimes even 10 weeks to get the carrier approval to send the short code.
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And the reason is, once you have the short code, you’re able to send out those messages in mass all at the same time. And so they’re very cautious and
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very careful about approving those short codes to make sure that the channel stays intact and with integrity and
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the spam is quite limited there. And then with the RCS we talked about the trust factor just being so much higher there. We’ve talked about the brand
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exposure, right? The short code could be any phone number. It could be your family. It could also be your vendor.
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The short code is what’s used most often. I’m sorry, the long code is what’s used most often. The short code is that five or six-digit number.
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It’s harder to get. There is a little bit more trust there. And then we talked about the RCS verified sender. And
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the hoops that brands have to go through to get that vetted and verified and to earn that RCS agent. And
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then there’s some other things too. We talked about text and media. We’ve talked about the interactivity.
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There really isn’t any interactivity with SMS and MMS other than a reply,
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right? Maybe they’ve clicked through your URL, but there’s not much interactivity other than maybe a response and that click. Whereas RCS,
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there’s all kinds of things to see and interact with. Yeah, we talked about max character count and analytics.
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So if we step back and look at this,
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this is a bullhorn, if you will, or a funnel maybe on its side, of much smaller
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value on the left and then much, much larger value on the right.
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So one interesting anecdote from a customer who’s been testing RCS is
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that they in in their funnel and how they use it compared to RCS, they
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would have bigger click-through rates but lower conversion, which you can imagine having seen that previous example, right? So if you’ve got a link
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without a description or whatever, you may get more clicks. But what they’re seeing is when you combine this
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high credibility and clear call to action, they are seeing fewer clicks but much bigger conversion with the RCS messaging.
26:46
Yeah. People know what they’re clicking on. Yeah. Yes. Yep. Yeah.
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There’s just… it’s a high value message, right? High engagement, high value, branded, verified. There’s just a lot to it. It’s great. As the keeper
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of the glossary, I will just point out on that slide the RCS Rich and RCS Rich Media. I think if TrueDialog had been
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in charge of naming everything, we might not have named it that. Those are industry standard terms and they’re just a little bit confusing. That RCS Rich
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means it’s rich because it’s got your logo and it’s got the ability to have those links. But when we talk about the carousels and the
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images, that is Rich Media. So, both of them have that word rich attached. Rich versus Rich Media. So, it’s a little confusing. Yeah.
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Just like agents. Agents are not… we’ll keep working on the verbiage.
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Well, and I’ll just I’ll just add to this too that we talked about the value of the different messages and the message types and how they’re sent, but
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the pricing is also sort of associated to it as well, right? The pricing of each message. Everything in text
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messaging is done by a per message basis and RCS is done as well by a per message basis. You can see your SMS
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long code is going to be your cheapest, generally speaking. With short codes you start to get into volume
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pricing. RCS is interesting. Right now it is charged by message. However,
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in Europe, because it has been around so much longer, they do have the option to price by conversation, which
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is a use case that is not available here in the US today. I don’t know when it will be coming here. I
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anticipate that the carriers and Google and Apple will adopt that in the probably not too distant future.
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But as of today, RCS is priced just like the other message types on a per price or per message basis.
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And I see we do have a… well, let’s talk about the agent. We’ll circle back.
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I see there’s a couple of questions about RCS Media.
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Do you want… if you think the questions… we’re happy to dig into… I think there’s an action of “what would those links be on RCS Rich Media?”
28:59
So that could be a click-to-text, a click-to-phone, it can be a click-to-a-map. Um, let me go back to this example then.
29:07
Exactly. We’ll go back to that. And then it can just be a click to any site named anything, which is wonderful,
29:14
right? So that you can make it be “Schedule a campus visit” and that can be to the scheduling page. “Take a virtual tour” can be to the virtual tour page. So
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you can take it to any activity that you want just with that HTML link. And if you have a chat link, then you can also have an auto-reply for that chat. So,
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quite a bit of flexibility already with I think probably more and more over time.
29:36
Yeah, that’s also exciting. Just I’m thinking of like “book your demo now,” right? And having it go to the calendar,
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the native calendar in the phone so that the prospect can check their calendar and see what works best for them. So, it’s super exciting. Yeah,
29:52
and my head right now is in live music land. And so I’m thinking very much about some of the stadiums and
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sports teams that we work with that are trying to cross-sell and promote tickets for other types of events that
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they have happening. And so using this from a sales standpoint as well, I think is going to be really exciting.
30:15
Yeah, for sure. For sure.
30:19
So speaking of my favorite term, let’s talk about let’s talk about agents. We know agents are a little different. Let’s talk about what that means.
30:26
Agents are a little different. So an agent… every agent is a combination of two things: your brand—you as a verified sender, your name, your logo,
30:36
your business details, who are you proving that you are who you say you are—and then a specific messaging
30:44
purpose. So are you using this for marketing? Is it for customer support?
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Is it for sales? Is it a “your prescription is ready” message? So you might have under certain circumstances more than one agent
30:57
because each agent is approved for that particular messaging purpose. So an agent is the combination of those two
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things: your brand and your messaging purpose. Yeah.
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Yeah. I I can say just internally speaking as we’re going through our pilot program last year we were talking about
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what is your agent strategy, right? Like let’s say you’re a brand. Let’s say that you’re a major team, a sports team of
31:23
some sport, you pick. And does it make sense to have a sponsorship agent,
31:30
a partnership agent, a ticketing agent, customer success agent? I think time will tell. We’ll see some
31:38
of the best practices that come out of the industry and how other brands are doing this. I know that I work with Walgreens as my
31:46
my pharmacy and they have a very specific RX agent,
31:53
right? It’s a very specific use case of “when is your prescription ready? Do you want a refill? It’s
32:00
fulfilled now. Do you want it delivered or are you going to come pick it up?”
32:04
Those types of things. Very specific to that agent. That is that messaging purpose that they felt… and that forces a lot of planning,
32:12
doesn’t it? And this is something we’ll talk about more and I think webinar three is that planning for what’s right for your business.
32:20
What is your first messaging purpose?
32:22
Where do you want to start with this process? Where… what’s the best place to test?
32:27
How do you want to roll out? And just completing that agent is something that forces those thoughts and
32:34
conversation and strategy as you go through the process.
32:38
Yeah, the agent application will require you to provide your messaging purpose,
32:42
right? So understanding your very first use case… I’m going to say it’s good thing that if people want to do that here that
32:51
we have people who can help coach them through that process. Absolutely.
32:54
And talk through that from you know, a strategy perspective—if there’s changes you need to make, how you want to stage it. So that’ll be something
33:02
that we’ll also be talking about a little bit today but across all of the conversations for sure.
33:11
Speaking of which, I’ll get started but we’ll let Sarah jump into this as well. You know, so part of my team’s
33:18
specialization is really having expertise on how to register, how to get approved from carriers. And so
33:27
this is just another level of that approval. As you can see, for those of you
33:35
who’ve been through this before, the 10DLC and short code have very different—because of that level of
33:43
verification and how people are using it—they have very different setup times. There’s a little bit of a different process.
33:51
However, what’s interesting about all of these is that the types of things that you need to do this registration
34:01
are very similar across the board. And so you know, you still have a use case, you still have a
34:08
brand, you still have those things. So it’s not like this is particularly more complex. It’s just very much building on
34:16
some of the things that you’ve already done. It’s just that it’s going to a different place to make that approval happen. And if you are starting from
34:25
scratch, because of things like a fallback message, you may need to stage these of getting a different
34:32
one of your SMS pieces approved first to be ready to apply for your RCS agent.
34:38
So, there is while while the input is not great, I do think these are areas that are right for handholding and
34:47
getting coaching along the way as you’re getting yourself set up.
34:51
And this seems like a good moment. We did have a question: “when is RCS available in the TrueDialog platform?” It is available in the TrueDialog platform.
34:59
It is available now. And that… the first step is that agent registration process which as you can see takes some time. So we can start. Becky is
35:09
ready to help walk you through that process, holding your hand and learning together as the carriers themselves gel their processes
35:18
to get you started, get the agent in place so that another quarter away from now, you can actually be starting your campaigns.
35:28
Yeah, I was going to say this at the end, but you don’t need to wait till webinar number three if you are ready right now. I’m B. Bisick at True
35:35
Dialog. So if we have not met yet, feel free to reach out and we will get you started right away.
35:41
There’s no rule that you have to wait for a webinar.
35:45
I think one of the things that I love about our platform is… gosh, I don’t know, last year, the year before,
35:51
we launched an automated 10DLC registration inside of our UI platform
35:57
where the application… so many of what we were hearing from prospects and customers was that that application process
36:04
was paper. If you can imagine a paper process where a vendor might say “here, print this out, fill it out, scan it,
36:13
fax it back—fax it, fax it back—email it back, we’ll process it.” Right? And if you can just imagine the sort of
36:21
manual load of transferring the application from paper and some system inputting somebody typing it all back
36:27
36:35
Application on the back side. We handhold and share, you know, handhold and work with our customers and our prospects through that application process and make sure everything is adhering to the carrier regulations and the governing
36:52
bodies to make sure that everything is filled out to a tea and likelihood of approval is high. Right?
37:01
So, same thing with RCS. We’ve actually built that RCS agent application into the platform. So, you’re filling it out once. It goes through the backend digitally. We work with the ecosystem to make sure
37:15
that your RCS agent application has a high likelihood of approval as well. That’s where Becky’s team is our experts. So, I know I’m feeling like I recently got to the episode of The Pit.
37:29
If anybody is not watching The Pit, I highly recommend it. But they were just at the point where—oh, no wait. I shouldn’t say it. Never mind. I’m
37:37
going to give something away if people have not made it to this episode. So sh—maybe next time I’ll mention it, but fax machines were making me think of something that happens on The Pit, and so I won’t spoil anything.
37:53
Fax is an interesting use case. We do have a question from the audience around the $700 T-Mobile registration
38:01
fee for your RCS agent. That is something that we do not charge. It is something that T-Mobile actually charges and with your RCS agent, you have to actually apply with the carriers directly. So, is that applicable to each agent or once per company? As far
38:17
as I know, that is for each agent. That is for each and every agent that your company is going to have. But it is a one-time
38:26
fee, unlike a short code which is anywhere between, you know, $800 and $1,200 that we’ve seen in the market. That is a monthly fee that is paid for the short code almost as a lease.
38:40
You’re leasing that short code number and you’re paying that rental fee on it every month. The RCS agent T-Mobile application fee is a one-time fee.
38:51
It does get back to that very different orientation thinking about agents if you’re used to thinking about the long and short codes, doesn’t it? Yeah. Absolutely. So, I think we’ve covered this a bit,
39:05
but I would love, you know, for Amanda for you to have a chance to talk a little bit more about what you’re excited about—some of the value that this is going to bring to marketers and those who are sending messages.
39:16
Yeah, just the idea of this RCS and you know, the creative explosion of options that are now available—and I won’t just say now available, I will say now accessible, right? Like, I’m not a
39:32
very sophisticated marketer. I’m not generally working with developers to design applications in-app marketing examples the way that some consumer businesses do. But the arrival of
39:50
RCS is, as we mentioned, huge from a marketing perspective. The arrival of RCS as a composer, as a visual composer—the way that it is in our TrueDialog platform—just makes it that much more accessible to your everyday marketer of
40:09
all different skill set backgrounds and tenure in the market, their familiarity with text messaging or not, right? And so the use cases, when you think of it that way, just explode.
40:26
Like I was working with a prospect who’s a travel company and talking with them about RCS on different tour packages that they have, right? We have 10 cards. You have the opportunity
40:43
and potential to feature 10 different tours as a travel agency, right? We can talk about the sports teams. The idea—I go to a lot of sports games—and the idea of having the tickets downloaded to my wallet from one RCS
41:00
message. Downloaded to my wallet: here are my tickets. Also, the idea of pre-ordering concessions. Thank you very much, I would love to! Right? Have those delivered to my seat when I get there.
41:11
The “know before you go.” Please save me from bringing my big bag in if you’re going to stop me at the door and turn me away for having a big bag. So, there’s a ton of, you know, the merch in the games, right? The ability to send
41:28
game day merch. Maybe it’s a playoff game—winner of the playoff game. You get that immediate RCS message in the game, right? You can send it while your fans are sitting there right after you won to get the championship t-shirt or hat or
41:43
whatever it might be. With pictures! Right? You can have that t-shirt in white, you can have that t-shirt in black, you can have that t-shirt in gray. Like, here are all the pictures. So, just really exciting when I start to think about the
41:58
application of RCS and what you can do with it. I talked about two industries and we haven’t even touched on the others like healthcare, or insurance, or financial services, or—oh my gosh—higher education.
42:14
Higher education… like, again, I think about my own kids who will not answer anything and how I have to send pictures of my pugs to get them to pay attention even to an SMS message that I send. So, this is going to be very, very—and by the way, that is very effective if I need to get a response, sending a pug pick with it.
42:31
But all of those things are definitely going to work well with that audience. Yeah.
42:37
And you’re right, and it’s right there for our teenage kids who barely read a text, but certainly aren’t going to be looking at an email. They’re also not really going to be necessarily looking at an app. And one of the things that I think is so great about RCS and the creativity of it is it
42:52
can be an app-like experience without an app that you hope people download and maybe they don’t, and you hope that they keep it updated and that they don’t delete it when they’re clearing stuff off their phone. So you get all of that advantage of the interactivity and the creativity, but it’s a whole lot easier.
43:10
And response rate is—and I’ll just add—you get all that inside the native messaging app on their phone, which they will not delete because their mother is sending them pictures of the pugs.
43:19
There you go.
43:19
Right! Like, you have the advantage of being in there next to mom and friends and family and your world, your inner circle. And so you brought up an excellent point that in-app notifications—well, first you have to get the app. You have to
43:34
download the app, and then if you have an update—I just wanted to use an app that I hadn’t used in a long time and it was requiring me to download the update. It wasn’t just there for me, right?
43:42
And then even when you do have that, if you’re a consumer like me, I turn off all my notifications because I don’t actually want you to be pushing in-app notifications to my phone.
44:00
And then you forget it’s off. And so the advantage of RCS is that interactivity, those advanced analytics, but also that it is the in-app type experience inside that native messaging app on the phone and tied—not tied per se, but can be interconnected with some of those other native apps
44:23
in the phone like your calendar, your phone app—the one that you make phone calls with—and the wallet. I think Google is allowing Android phones to connect to the Google Wallet. So, if you wanted to pay for something through the RCS
44:40
app, that would be available. So yeah, it’s just really exciting when I start to step back and think about all the options, all the things to do with it. And it’s going to be really fun, isn’t it?
44:53
As all of the folks listening on this call start going back to their teams and brainstorming and then coming to us and brainstorming with Becky and her team, it’s going to be amazing to see what people come up with and what they want to try and how they plan to use it to drive their business.
45:12
We do have a question. Speaking of which—oh, go ahead.
45:15
I’m sorry. We do have a question about: is Apple allowing the same wallet integration as Google? That I do not know. I apologize. I can find out and I can get back to you.
45:30
So, I’m going to speak a little bit to getting started, but I think this is very much a preview of the next two conversations that we have. I will say yet again: feel free to reach out if you’re ready to get started. You do not have to wait till webinar 3 to be able to do that. We talked about registering the
45:46
agent. Again, we are here to help you through that process. But then you’ve got time to start to think through, like, some of the things that we’ve been asking Amanda about—how are you thinking about how this fits into your overall channel mix.
46:00
I think of this as… like as I’ve been talking to people who have already gotten started or are a little bit down the path… it’s like, how are you starting now with letting your creative team know that this is something available to them? So, when they’re doing creative that they’re using across your channels,
46:18
how are they thinking about where that fits in for what you’re doing with RCS?
46:22
Like, this is going to be a new way or a new engagement. I’ve got a customer who was excited because they were going to be able to use our UI to be able to send these messages. So therefore, their creative team could utilize them even
46:38
more than they might be utilizing them right now. So be thinking about that. That’s an avenue for those of you who have just been doing text-only for all of this time. In addition, we talked about my favorite thing, data, which is: how are you letting your analytics team—whoever’s pulling this, are you pulling things into BI? What are you doing? Think about the fact that you’re going to have more data points to be able to do this. And so while you’re getting
46:58
that agent set up, we can start to talk about what you’re going to be doing to be able to consume that data or how you’re going to want to start to test it. So I think these are some of the ways that we’re thinking about working with you around how you dip your toe
47:12
in and get things started.
47:12
Yeah, I would just add that, you know, the agent registration—or I would say application and registration process—takes 8 to 10 weeks like you said, Becky, almost a full quarter. And so there is no harm in getting your application in, and then once approved,
47:30
there’s no harm in not using it right away. If you’re still working through some of the use cases inside your business, you’re still talking to the different teams that are interested in sending this out and working with the creative and analytics to capture the success metrics of your first campaigns.
47:47
So, no harm really in getting that application in and sort of waiting for the approval because it may take some time. And this might be a little bit more of a circle than a timeline, right? You want to do some
48:03
planning to decide what your first agent is going to be, but then you’ve got this waiting period. It doesn’t have to be sequential as you actually think about your first campaigns, your first strategy. So, I would say all of these could be parallel and then you might circle back to the
48:19
beginning on your second agent and kind of go from there as you develop that strategy.
48:25
Yeah, that’s an excellent point. It’s not necessarily linear. It can grow and scale. It’s a flywheel. Is that the right marketing term? Like a flywheel.
48:35
Something along it where you just get to—you don’t have to keep registering your agent, but you can do the rest. Right.
48:41
So, I know we’re getting close and I want to watch the time a little bit. Sarah and Amanda, are there any other questions we want to answer before closing things out?
48:53
Yeah, my only advice would be to get started early, right? The early bird gets the worm. Your competitors are probably not doing this. And the
49:02
advantage that you have to get in and start sending these and capture the engagement of your audience is a great thing to do. I think we talked about submitting your registration application, your agent
49:16
application early, and then also focusing on your opt-in database, right? Your opt-in compliance for your SMS is the same with RCS. So, yeah, just making sure that you’re staying compliant and sending to people who have opted in.
49:33
Yeah, that’s a great point. Everything that is true for SMS is still super important for RCS on opt-in compliance. And you may have some updates. If you’re a longtime SMS user, you may want to make sure that things are updated before you go down this path because
49:47
once you submit, you don’t want to have to redo things. That’s a new submission. So, make sure you’re kind of current and updated on all of those policies. Anyway,
49:58
the way I’ve been thinking about that is kind of like building code, right? Like the compliance code has changed over time. So, if you were able to opt into SMS five or six years ago, the terms and the conditions and your privacy policy may have to come up to
50:14
code, if you will. It may have to come up to today’s standards for your application. And so that’s a very good point, Sarah. If you’re already doing SMS and you want an RCS agent, you may have to look at the language on your website
50:30
and your opt-in practices just to make sure that they are up to today’s standards, because today’s standards are a little stricter.
50:37
I like that metaphor. Having done a home renovation, I think you’re spot on there, right? A lot of things can get by without being code until it goes on the market, right?
50:46
Yes. Exactly. As someone who’s got a lot of things in my house that are grandfathered into code… I will also say though that you know, what everybody’s saying is true, but we’ll also say like, those are also not things that you have to do on your own.
50:59
Let our team absolutely let our team that looks at these every single day take a look for you and we can help you through that process for sure.
51:11
Yeah. And we have a data point from that. We had a customer call earlier this morning who talked about us just being a true partner in helping them dip their toe into text messaging for the very first time a few years ago and what it really meant to their business and how it changed their business. So it was great to hear the validation that we are a true partner.
51:34
Any other questions before I—it looks like there is one new question here. Is the architecture with the RCS agent and employees in TrueDialog that are sending one-on-one? Are they the same place or two different accounts or sub-accounts?
51:49
I’m not sure that I understand that question.
51:51
Okay. I’d say the first one is that this is mostly because we’re not doing the conversation. So, I’ll answer these in pieces. Because we’re not doing the conversation agent right now—this is one of the things Amanda spoke to that’s available in other places in the world—right now the RCS use cases I think are much more one-to-many.
52:15
So I will say that as a whole, yes, I believe that this can be within any of the accounts. So if you want to set it up in the architecture as its own, you know, part of the account, then that is good as well. So, yeah, I think that you can kind of fit it in just like you would any other like new code. You can fit it into the architecture where it makes sense for you and we can help you with that.
52:43
I see his question specific to our platform and the account and sub-account. Yes. It is not meant to be though that if you—if your what we call root account, if you’ve got to get technical—it’s not that you need a new root account, for instance. So, it’s not like you’d have to log in and log out of our system to be able to send RCS alongside the fact that you may already be in the system and sending out other text messages.
53:07
So, all of that would still be within your existing root account. It’s just that within that root account, you can still use sub-accounts to differentiate in whatever way makes sense for your organization.
53:25
Awesome. Looks like that answered it.
53:28
Yeah, I think Becky, you touched on something that I just wanted to add really quickly, which is the one-to-many. So, RCS is set up for the one-to-many in a really well-done way: the verified sender, your images, your creative, the throughput, etc. The interesting point though is that there is the option to reply.
53:51
What happens if someone replies to your RCS message? What happens and where does that go? I think we’ll touch on that in some of the next webinars. We’ll talk about suggested replies and how those work. But also know that in our specific platform, we do have the opportunity for those replies to come in and be responded to on a one-to-one basis.
54:14
So if that makes sense: it’s one-to-many send, one-to-one response. But it is not really a good use case for one-to-one like a salesperson to their prospects or to their customers, if that makes sense.
54:36
Yep. And speaking of which, coming up—we’ve been hinting at this for a while that it’s a series. Coming up soon: Episode 2, “What marketing and sales teams need to know.” So we’ll dig in a little bit deeper on the use cases, maybe a little less tech.
44:58
And then also “RCS in action”—so much more about examples, use cases. So I’m excited to get to dig in more to actually see it in action, see it in our app itself, and think about with those audiences again. This really in my mind opens up who is going to be a part of your team now to get messages out to your audiences.
55:14
So, don’t forget, if it’s the right way to give a little exposure now to your marketing, sales, or analytics team members, feel free to bring them along or share a recording. So, I definitely think this is again one of those places to start the conversation with some of the other teams that you haven’t gotten to engage with to be able to send out messages for sure.
55:41
So, that being said, thank you all so much for joining us and appreciate the questions. And look forward to continuing the conversation over the coming weeks. And again, feel free to reach out if you have questions, if you’re ready to start working on your agent. We are here for you all to go ahead and get started.
