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Mar 15, 2021 Jean-Marc Cheong

Customer Experience Strategies: What is Rich Messaging?

What is Rich Messaging

The time that US users spend on their mobile phones is continuing to grow. According to TechCrunch, Americans spend about five hours per day on their cell phones. 92 percent of this time spent on apps like social media, messaging and entertainment - with just 8 percent spent on a web browser.

When it comes to your brand’s customer service strategy, this represents a huge opportunity to improve your omnichannel customer experience (CX) strategy and engage customers through business messaging solutions.

Messaging, such as short message service (SMS) or instant message (IM), are customer service methods that can improve the efficiencies of your call center, drive up customer satisfaction levels and boost the profitability of your business.

There is, however, a new messaging player in town that’s even more powerful than standard SMS - rich messaging. 

What exactly is rich messaging? 

Rich messaging, also known as rich communication services (RCS), is an enhanced messaging service that aims to replace traditional SMS messages with a text messaging system that is richer, allowing users to send and receive a range of multimedia content for an improved experience. 

Rich messaging is now the gold standard for mobile communication, supporting multiple forms of media. It’s the evolution of text messaging. Through rich messaging, users can send and receive rich forms of media that are not possible with SMS messaging, such as pictures, audio, videos, contacts and other forms of media. 

Providing a superior messaging customer service solution for your organization, rich messaging allows your business to capture new customers, better engage with customers on their preferred channel and interact with customers in real time. 

Features that come with rich messaging that aren’t offered by SMS include:

  • Larger 8,000 character limit
  • Video calls from within messages
  • Group messages
  • Cross-platform messages
  • Message analytics
  • Rich multimedia options, up to 10mb per message

4 ways rich messaging enhances your customer experience

Customer-focused businesses are utilizing call center technologies to increase meaningful conversation with their customers while at the same time reducing inefficiencies of traditional communication methods. Rich messaging does just that. 

Here are just a few of the top ways that rich messaging will improve your brand’s customer experience:

#1 - Build more meaningful conversations with your customers

Compared to SMS communication, rich communication services provide your customers with a richer experience. The ability to share multiple forms of media, depending on the customer’s specific query, makes it easier for customer service agents to answer customer queries - resulting in an easier and frictionless experience for the customer. 

Building conversations through multimedia is more interactive, engaging and valuable for your customer, resulting in happier and more loyal customers.

#2 - Improve the efficiencies of your customer service team

We live in an on-demand world where customers want to communicate with brands on the device, and at a time that best works for them. They expect personalized experiences and rapid responses.

By leveraging rich messaging, your business can provide its customers with on-demand support and easy self-service options on the application that customers want to contact you on. Customers now no longer have to phone your call center if they don’t want to, they can simply text you or message you on their favourite social media page.

#3 - Empower your customers to complete transactions

Customer service is all about making the entire customer experience seamless. To truly provide a world-class customer support strategy, your brand should look to build processes in which customers can do everything they want all in one location.

Rich messaging can help your brand support customers through their entire purchase lifecycle. Customer service agents can answer questions, send useful links and complete transactions all within the messaging service, helping to create a seamless experience.

#4 - Analyze how your rich messaging conversations are performing

Rich messaging gives organizations the ability to gain real-time insights into conversation analytics. You can use this data to see how well conversations are going with customers, as well as discover how customers are interacting with the media and links you send to them.

You can use these insights to gain deeper insights into the paint points of your consumers, better provide your customers with the information they are looking for and optimize your customer service program around what gets the best results. 

Want to learn more about rich messaging, and how it can benefit your customer service program? Contact Advantage Communication today. Our team of customer experience experts would love to discuss any questions that you may have.

 

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Published by Jean-Marc Cheong March 15, 2021
Jean-Marc Cheong