Less than 50 years ago, the world was revolutionized by color television. Today, our phones are revolutionizing how we communicate and connect with friends and family and now brands.

We recently had an opportunity to explore this at Mobile World Congress Americas 2018, when my colleague Bridget Earl, Senior Revenue Marketing Director at Syniverse, joined Carlos Aragon, Solutions Marketing Director at Mavenir, which Syniverse just announced a partnership with to develop a set of Rich Communication Services (RCS) solutions.

Carlos, second from left, and Bridget, far right, lead “Delivering Exceptional User Experiences with Rich Communications” at Mobile World Congress Americas 2018.

Carlos and Bridget presented “Delivering Exceptional User Experiences with Rich Communications,” which was one of the many sessions held at the Syniverse booth as part of our Innovation Theater. Our presentation addressed how traditional text messaging has become to seem static and antiquated for today’s connected brands and consumers, and how another service has now matured and fully emerged to transform text messaging.

Enter RCS. This new message delivery platform is drastically more engaging than traditional text messaging. What’s more, RCS doesn’t require an application to provide users with a full-color, interactive communication.

We showed some of the game-changers of RCS by taking an in-depth look at a case study of one text messaging campaign run two ways, one with traditional text messaging and another with RCS. Amazingly, the campaign with RCS was shown to achieve 10 times as many clicks as the traditional text messaging version did. While just one example, it demonstrates the potential of RCS and its value in meeting people’s desire for more interactive, visual messages.

We also showed RCS’s capabilities in a live demo. In one scenario, a consumer, Bridget, was able to scroll through restaurant menu options that were broken down by category, view an order, and place it all through RCS messages. Carlos served as the restaurant and was able to provide information to me along the way and then confirm the order.

The demo and case study illustrated two benefits for businesses. First, we showed how RCS offers valuable analytics for brands to be able to see the conversion rate of their messages. This allows brands to drill down to details such as how many users are engaging with the message and the path taken to purchase.

Second, we showed how RCS offers easy onboarding. While text messaging can require a business to wait up to 10 weeks to receive a short code for it to utilize for its messages, RCS has the potential to cut the process of vetting messages and new services like chatbots from two and a half months to just minutes.

At Syniverse, we’re excited about RCS’s capabilities and believe we’re at the beginning of a new era of text messaging, and this is one reason we took the next step in strengthening our services by recently forming a partnership with Mavenir. The collaboration will allow businesses to create an “app-like” experience within the native text messaging service already available on all people’s phones, and not require businesses to develop new stand-alone applications. To this end, our new solutions are designed to offer a true one-stop shop of advanced mobile messaging capabilities to empower mobile operators to preserve current application-to-person (A2P) messaging revenue and at the same time capture new opportunities from rich business messaging.

RCS is opening a new era in messaging that will soon revolutionize how companies and consumers interact. At Syniverse, we’ve had the fortune to play a key role in text messaging’s development ever since it first became available almost two and a half decades ago. Through our partnership with Mavenir and many other initiatives, we’re looking forward to building on this legacy and empowering customers to begin an exciting new chapter with RCS.

Have you tried RCS yet or used it for any of your company’s customer services? If so, I’d love to hear about your experience. Please leave me a comment.

Chris Wright

As Vice President of Product Management, Chris Wright oversees the mid-term strategy for Syniverse’s product portfolios, using close working relationships with customers and in-depth research of industry trends. Since first joining Syniverse, in 1996, Chris has held a number of senior positions, including, most recently, Senior Director of Global Messaging, in which he was responsible for global P2P messaging strategy and product development, and Managing Director and Acting Vice President of Syniverse’s Würzburg, Germany, office, in which he led the integration of the A2P and P2P messaging businesses of MACH following Syniverse’s acquisition of that company. His other positions have included Development Manager for Signaling Solutions and Messaging, Technology Research Manager and Senior Product Manager. Over his 20-year-plus career, Chris has made numerous contributions to the telecommunication industry, which have included co-authoring the gateway Short Message Peer-to-Peer Protocol (SMPP) interoperability standards that are currently utilized in North America. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electromechanical engineering from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton.