RCS business messaging

RCS business messaging is planned for HLB. Availability and supported capabilities would vary by account. RCS would give your messages a richer experience than plain SMS on compatible phones.

With RCS, your business name could appear in the inbox instead of only a phone number. A cleaning company or salon could send an appointment message with an image and tappable buttons, rather than a block of text.

Depending on your plan and configuration, you could send:

• Branded messages that would show your business identity
• Images and rich media layouts that would appear in the message
• Tappable buttons that would let recipients call, open a link or pick a suggested reply
• Standalone rich cards that would include a title, description, image and buttons
• Carousels that would hold multiple swipeable cards in one message

You could send RCS as a one-to-one message from a contact's conversation thread, or as a campaign through bulk actions with prebuilt RCS snippets. The planned feature would also support RCS in supported workflows. Sending would require an approved RCS sender and recipient consent, and opt-outs would apply across both RCS and SMS. Delivery states such as sent, delivered and opened could appear, depending on the recipient's device.

Not every recipient could receive RCS. It would depend on the person's device, messaging app and app settings. Most modern Android phones using a supported messaging app would be compatible, while iPhone support would vary. HLB would detect what each recipient could receive, and with RCS unavailable and fallback turned on, the message would go out as an SMS instead. Because of that, you would write each message so the plain text version would still make sense without the image or buttons.