The unfair advantage of RCS over WhatsApp Business Messaging

RCS, or Rich Communication Services as we all know is an upgrade of the age-old SMS. How so? It enables android users to exchange rich messages with each other over their native messaging app -the same app they received SMS in. Similar to WhatsApp, with RCS users can share images, videos, GIFs, attachments and more on the messaging app. They can even create groups and see the “user is typing” animations within the messaging interface. The experience is really rich and interactive hence the term — Rich Communication Services. For those of you who are learning about RCS for the first time, below is what messaging over RCS looks like:

When compared with WhatsApp, RCS doesn’t have much difference except for three as much as I have understood:

WhatsApp supposedly has over 2 billion monthly active users. And RCS is being claimed to reach around 1.2 billion subscribers by 2022. The numbers — being in billions, both the messaging channels obviously are catching the eye of the business world, where Google — a dominant player in RCS, and Whatsapp — a leader in messaging space by itself, are working hard towards building infrastructure and capabilities to enable businesses to reach out to their customers on both of these channels. The aim is to help businesses build chatbots that would enable businesses to market their products, sell their products and offer service to the folks who buy their products right from within the messaging apps. Sounds cool, isn’t it?

But wait, that’s not it. Similar to WhatsApp and RCS, there are numerous channels like Instagram, telegram, Viber etc which are aiming to achieve the same, with the objective to finally monetise their messaging channels.

However, in the long run, which among the two major channels will dominate the market? While I myself use WhatApp daily than RCS, my instinct still goes towards RCS — if they are able to simplify the implementation of Business to consumer RCS messaging and reduce/omit dependency over the network service providers, since not all network service providers are supporting RCS today.

Why?

Because of Consumer Behavior!

RCS, therefore has an opportunity to position itself as a space for all-business-conversations. It can create a differentiator in the minds of the end users that RCS is the mode of communication that you need whenever you need to converse with a brand. So that your personal messaging space remains personal. After all, why should a customer give up their peace and fill their personal messaging space with junk in exchange for something they have not asked for at all?

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