GSMA: ‘RCS will create a market worth more than $74 billion by next year’
At the 2019 Competitive Carriers Association Convention last September, Josh Wigginton, VP of product management at Interop Technologies, spoke about the state of Rich Communication Services (RCS), arguing, that despite a slow adoption, 2019 was a pivotal year for RCS, which is now picking up as business use cases become more evident.
He said that he expected there to be more than a 1 billion RCS users by next year.
Well, with 2019 behind us, the GSMA has bolstered Wigginton’s prediction, reporting that the next generation of SMS is set to explode in 2020, creating a market worth more than $74 billion by next year.
Everyone from Google to the major U.S. mobile operators seems to have caught the RCS bug as of late, with the former rolling out its own RCS messaging service to U.S. users, and the latter establishing a new joint venture—called the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative, or CCMI—to enable cross-carrier RCS messaging just weeks earlier.
In addition, new research commissioned by mGage shows a strong interest for RCS messaging, with over 51% of respondents saying they would use text more if doing so provided a more similar experience to using other phone apps. Further, RCS has revealed itself to be more engaging for users, with trials showing 14 times higher engagement rates and generally a higher response rate with consumers.
“With the arrival of RCS, comes a convenient and appealing channel that has an additional layer of trust amongst consumers, as each organization that uses RCS like charities, banks and retailers must be verified so when a message is received it is guaranteed to be safe and the origin is known,” said Nick Millward, vice president Europe at mGage. “The reliability and adaptability of the RCS system gives brands a variety of use-cases and applications for their customer service strategy.”
He provided the example of an airline sending a reminder via RCS to check in for a flight—an experience most of us have had by now. However, with RCS, the airline would, at the same time, offer the ability to access the full check-in experience with boarding pass, flight updates and terminal maps.
Millward added that what RCS really offers brands and marketing firms is “an effective and interactive channel to communicate to its consumers.”
“The richness of content that it gives end-users boosts response rates and with no extra installation of apps needed it is an easy solution with exponential possibilities,” he continued.
As Wigginton admitted back in September, RCS has seen slow adoption, which he said is because there wasn’t a strong, compelling business case for mobile operators to launch. “They were asking: how am I actually going to make money off this service?” he said.
But, thanks to A2P, or application to person messaging, which is driving RCS adoption globally by connecting brands and enterprises to subscribers, that’s not the case anymore. “If you think about the way marketing works, it follows the eyeballs,” explained Wigginton. “Now, messaging is where the eyeballs are, so that’s where the brand wants to engage subscribers.”
