In a world where customers’ expectations are higher than ever, businesses face a big question: how do we communicate with people in a way that's not just efficient, but genuinely engaging and impactful?

The good news is that two game-changing technologies are ready to help: RCS for Business and AI.

Each of these technologies is powerful on its own, but when you put them together, they’re changing how brands connect with their customers. We're talking about moving past basic alerts and diving into a whole new world of meaningful, real-time conversations where every interaction is smarter, more personal, and more effective at driving conversions and building lasting customer loyalty.

For years, businesses have relied on traditional messaging channels for critical customer communications. While effective for simple notifications, these often lack the richness and interactive qualities needed to be truly engaging. With its support for high-resolution images, video, carousels, suggested replies, and verified sender profiles, RCS for Business has already elevated the messaging experience. Now, by combining the power of AI with RCS for Business, brands can move beyond one-way alerts and build intelligent, two-way conversations.

How RCS for Business gets even better with AI

RCS for Business provides a rich messaging platform. When you add the power of AI, specifically Vertex AI, the platform becomes a dynamic engine for meaningful, personalized interactions. AI enables you to deliver truly engaging experiences and drive customer engagement across their entire journey, all within their native messaging app.

Imagine a customer journey where every message feels tailor-made and every interaction is effortless. Here's how leveraging RCS for Business and AI together is making that a reality:

• Personalized messaging at scale: AI solutions can analyze customer data, preferences, and past interactions to craft hyper-personalized messages. Instead of generic promotions, customers receive offers, updates, and recommendations that truly resonate with their individual needs and interests, such as a customer who recently purchased a new couch receiving a personalized offer for matching throw pillows. AI can also be used to write compelling, on-brand message copy, suggest the most effective images or videos, and even A/B test different creative approaches automatically, saving marketing teams a huge amount of time and optimizing campaign performance. 

• Intelligent automation and instant support: With AI-powered automation, brands can offer instant, 24/7 support within RCS for Business, handling a vast array of customer inquiries. By leveraging Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a key technology that allows a bot to understand messy, unstructured human language, these intelligent agents can handle complex queries beyond simple keywords. This allows them to resolve customer needs instantly, freeing up human agents for more complex interactions.

• Real-time conversational journeys: The combination of RCS for Business's rich features with AI tools enables more dynamic conversations. Customers can ask questions, clarify details, and receive immediate, relevant responses. This back-and-forth dialogue creates a more natural and satisfying experience. 

  AI-powered sentiment analysis can even detect a customer's emotional state in real-time, allowing for instant escalation to a human agent if a customer is frustrated or confused. 

• Proactive engagement: AI can predict customer needs and initiate proactive conversations. For example, it could detect a potential issue with a product a customer has purchased, and send an RCS message offering immediate support or a solution, before the customer even realizes there's a problem. This forward-thinking approach demonstrates a commitment to customer care and helps build stronger loyalty.

• Security and fraud prevention: AI's role in RCS for Business also extends to security. It can be used to detect and prevent spam, phishing, and fraud in real-time, adding a crucial layer of defense for both businesses and their customers.

Driving action at every step of the customer journey

These are just a few examples, but here’s how you can drive action across every stage of the customer journey when you integrate intelligent AI functionalities into your RCS for Business strategy:

• Discovery stage: When a potential customer is just starting to explore your brand, they might initiate a chat directly from your website, a search result, or a social media ad. At this point, you can easily set up an AI-powered bot to act as a virtual shopping assistant. This bot can help them quickly find and compare products, answering questions right there in the chat.

• Continued engagement: Once a potential customer has shown some interest, AI can step in to keep the conversation going. With personalized recommendations and offers based on the customer’s behavior, it's like having a personal shopper send them exactly what they're looking for. 

• Easy to buy: With AI-powered in-chat payments and bookings, your customers can complete transactions right within their native messaging app. They won't need to exit the conversation to visit a website or link to another app, which successfully minimizes dropoffs. It all happens seamlessly, thanks to AI understanding their intent and guiding them through the purchase.

• Post-purchase support: After someone has made a purchase, you can use AI-powered bots to provide instant, 24/7 in-message support. Think order tracking, answering FAQs, and even providing clear instructions or answering specific questions about product setup. If a customer's question or issue is too complex, the bot can seamlessly transfer the conversation to a human agent, ensuring that they always get the help they need.

• Long-term loyalty: To build strong long-term relationships, you can configure AI to automatically trigger proactive engagement based on behavior or events – whether that's a prior purchase or an upcoming birthday. This makes it easy to stay connected with customers in a personal way.

Along the way, you can access helpful analytics, so you can always see what’s working best as you deliver exciting new in-message experiences and drive tangible results for your brand. AI can also provide predictive analytics to forecast customer behavior or campaign outcomes and analyze the performance of multimedia content, so you know which carousels get the most engagement and which videos lead to conversion.

Now that you’ve seen how AI can transform your messaging, explore the RCS for Business partner directory to learn more about how you can leverage automation through AI to improve your customer journeys.