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For anything beyond one-way notifications, SMS offers a terrible user experience. It supports only 160-character texts, rudimentary images, emojis, and little else. Any functionality beyond text updates forces designers to create clunky text-to-web or text-to-app bridges that rarely work seamlessly. Or they must build elaborate, inflexible conversational text decision trees. Users often experience a Wile E. Coyote-style moment, running in midair before falling into the ravine. If motivated, they might hunt-and-peck their way to the right location. RCS could finally change this.
The Hunt-and-Peck User Journey
We’ve all seen the hunt-and-peck user journey. You search for a service or click on an ad, agree to sign up, and the next screen has no connection to what brought you there. You are forced to recreate your steps, clicking around a virtually new site to complete your task. You are like a new typist, scanning for individual keys to do your work.
Deep-linking, which creates a link that takes you directly to the task, is one way to work around this anti-pattern. It sends users to the exact spot they need to be to complete their job. This is challenging enough in typical web applications, let alone when crossing mediums from text-to-app or text-to-web.
What if the app on the phone logged you out or was out of date? If going from text-to-web, how would the website authenticate you?
Typically, the website would put up an authentication wall, and once you wrestle with the password, it conveniently forgets the URL that brought you there. Meanwhile, annoying prompts to download the app or pop-up to signup for lists you’ve already signed up for eat up precious screen real estate. Happens only to me? Oh, okay.
The point is, while implementing deep-linking within the same medium is challenging, achieving it across different mediums is nearly impossible. In specific cases, such as accepting credit cards where strict constraints are applied, the user experience can be low friction but never entirely painless.
Why We Put With Up this Clunky Experience
Attentive founder Brian Long recalls an early company survey showing that, unlike email, SMS is always read. Brian used statistical sampling to confirm what we intuitively know: if you want to get someone’s attention, send a text. In the last two decades, user attention has become six to nine times more expensive. In that light, for the attention it guarantees, text messaging is remarkably cheap. The text message is the bullhorn hidden in every phone, in every pocket, and the reason we tolerate its alphanumeric pager-era user interface.
Sidebar: The Economics of Attention
In advertising, you first have to get a customer’s attention to persuade them to buy what you’re selling. The central idea in the Economics of Attention is that consumer attention is finite, and the best way to handle it is to treat it as an economically scarce commodity.
Attention is a function of intensity and duration, i.e., how well and how long you can keep the consumer engaged before you can begin persuading. The more exclusive the attention, the pricier it gets. This isn’t just true in advertising. Public speaking, conferences, and other events also vie for attention. Even if they’re not explicitly using the recommended frameworks, their success depends on how they gain and sustain attention.
Text messaging is a cost-effective way to get a recipient’s undivided attention. However, to use it well, each message must be short, timely, actionable, and relevant (S.T.A.R). Additionally, because the attention is absolute, the messaging frequency must be just right.
RCS and the Conversational Commerce Use Case
How will RCS change this user experience? Instead of listing features like a home improvement parts catalog, let’s consider the conversational commerce use case.
Nowhere is the clunkiness of SMS more apparent than in conversational commerce. The ultimate goal in commerce is to exchange money; in conversational commerce, the goal is to use text prompts to get the customer to buy. To keep the customer in-channel and not lose the intent-to-buy, you must build elaborate back-end integration where a simple “yes” response can charge a credit card on file. The other option is to push the user to a browser. If an app is available, strategically placed deep links can create App Clips on iOS or Instant Apps on Android. All these take the user out of the messaging channel.
If the user is already authenticated, then technically, the brand can initiate a payment transaction. For unauthenticated conversations, RCS also allows:
- Dedicated Chatbot: Deep linking to a dedicated chatbot that keeps the user in the RCS medium.
- 3rd Party App: 3rd party support via an app, for example Paypal or an MNO app (which probably will never happen in the US).
- Browser or Web View: Access to payments via Web Browser or Web View. This is different from the current bridge because once the payment is complete, the user can then be directed back to the conversation.
- Google, Samsung, Apple(?) Pay: The RCS spec allows access to tokenized payment cards on the mobile device relying on device authentication for secure customer authentication (SCA).
While all options are an improvement over current methods, options 1 and 4 hold the best promise for fixing the brittle ecommerce experience. You can either transfer the conversation to another bot that authenticates and processes the credit card information, or use the underlying OS’s built-in mechanism to process credit cards. Both are marked improvements over the current state of affairs.
Finally
Since 2006, I’ve observed many creative solutions for building seamless user experiences in both text and voice. Designers and developers have worked with outdated tools to create next-generation applications. With RCS, that’s about to change. Conversational texting is one example where the aspirational and the possible will meet.
Earlier this month, I got my first Android device in six years. I am excited to see the new applications that RCS will enable. More importantly, I’m looking forward to testing firsthand how cross-platform, cross-carrier (it’s on a different network) RCS messaging works. Interoperability is text messaging’s secret sauce, watching how RCS preserves and enhances it will be exciting.
PS: I’m offering my Android device as a tester to cool never-before-seen RCS apps. Let me know how I can help!