On Matt Ramerman’s farm, complexity gets no applause.

Matt lives in rural Washington with his wife and two daughters, where much of life outside work is spent riding horses, caring for animals, and managing a working farm. The animals still need to be cared for. The work still needs to get done. Adding more steps does not make the process more impressive. It makes it less efficient.

That experience has shaped Matt’s leadership philosophy: complexity is usually friction, inefficiency, and a massive time suck. The goal is not to manage more of it. The goal is to remove it.

That is also how he thinks about customer experience.

In the early 2000s, Matt was a principal at a Seattle digital advertising agency. As the iPhone arrived, one of his Fortune 100 clients noticed something troubling. More customers were opening the brand’s emails on mobile devices, but the performance of those emails was declining. Views and clicks were worse among mobile users.

The client held up her phone and posed the question that would redirect Matt’s career: if this device was becoming the context in which customers experienced the brand, there had to be a better way to reach them.

Matt went back to his creative and development teams. They began moving the customer’s communications program from email to SMS and MMS. The technical work was difficult, but the underlying idea was simple: communicate with consumers in the place where they already lived.

It worked. The channel reduced the friction between receiving a message and acting on it. That experience led Matt to co-found Vehicle in 2010, building technology that helped large enterprises use mobile messaging and personalized media to manage the customer lifecycle. Vehicle was acquired by CLX, now Sinch, in 2018.

More than fifteen years later, Matt still sees enterprises struggling with the same fundamental problem. They want a direct, one-to-one relationship with customers, but they keep putting friction between the customer and the conversation.

RCS may be new. Matt’s mission is not.

About The Series

This is the next installment in the One Expert, One Topic series, where field experts select a topic and share essential insights using Matt Abrahams’ What/So What/Now What format. Each piece begins as a live interview. I then turn the conversation into a written article, using AI to help with speech to text and editing. The written format gives you more time to absorb the topic and a starting point for learning more. We are grateful to our contributors for sharing their wisdom.

What

Matt believes mobile messaging should be the operating system for customer experience.

The idea predates RCS. Since at least 2008, he has viewed mobile messaging as the largest untapped opportunity for enterprises to build loyalty, unlock revenue, and manage the customer relationship. RCS makes acting on that opportunity more urgent.

Look at the alternatives.

Direct mail is expensive. Phone calls are costly and increasingly unwelcome. Email still has a role, but it is slower, less responsive, and competing inside inboxes that most consumers can barely manage. An app can provide a rich experience, but it is expensive to build, deploy, maintain, and persuade customers to download.

Messaging is already on the device. It is where consumers spend their time and where conversations naturally happen.

That does not make RCS effortless. It introduces a new technology, a new set of channel rules, and new operational requirements. But Matt makes an important distinction: enterprises do not necessarily need an entirely new customer strategy. They need to learn how to express an existing strategy through a new channel.

The business objectives remain familiar. Reduce churn. Improve onboarding. Increase conversion. Strengthen loyalty. Resolve customer questions. The key performance indicators do not disappear because the message now includes buttons, rich media, or read receipts.

The strategies translate. The measurements translate. What changes are the rules of engagement.

Consider churn.

A direct-to-consumer company may already know which moments in the customer lifecycle are most predictive of churn and which interventions are most likely to prevent it. Years of testing may have established the right offer, timing, and audience. Today, that intervention may arrive through email.

Matt’s argument is not that the company should discard the strategy and start over. It should take the proven touchpoint and translate it into messaging.

That does not mean copying an email into an RCS conversation. Email and messaging have different expectations. The language, timing, interaction design, and customer permission model need to reflect the channel.

But the underlying job remains the same.

The difference is that the customer is more likely to see the message, engage with it, and act. RCS also gives marketers the analytics they expect from a modern digital channel. Brands can measure read rates, button activity, clicks, and engagement with media inside the thread.

Then RCS adds something email cannot provide as naturally: an immediate conversation.

If a customer does not understand the churn-prevention offer, they can ask a question in the same thread. The brand can answer a basic FAQ or clarify the offer while the customer is still considering it. Matt has seen that moment of clarification materially improve response and conversion.

The strategy did not change. The channel removed friction from it.

So What

For years, enterprise marketers could see that SMS performed. What they often lacked was the empirical measurement needed to justify putting more budget, people, and strategic importance behind it.

SMS could produce strong engagement, but its analytics package was limited compared with email or other digital channels. Marketers were being asked to trust inferred performance while operating inside organizations built around dashboards, attribution, and measurable returns.

RCS closes much of that gap.

Read receipts, button interactions, media views, and other in-thread behaviors give marketers evidence they can take back to the organization. RCS does not merely make the message richer. It makes the channel easier to measure, defend, and improve.

Apple’s decision to support RCS also created a path toward the scale enterprises need before treating a channel as foundational. Matt says the speed of that development caught much of the industry by surprise. Enterprise awareness and readiness have not kept pace. He still encounters large companies with little or no understanding that the channel exists, much less a plan for adopting it.

That is the real gap.

The industry has spent years explaining what RCS can display: cards, carousels, images, suggested replies, and buttons. Those capabilities matter, but features alone do not tell an enterprise how to reorganize around the channel.

A company still needs to determine who owns the program. It needs a technical roadmap, governance, staffing, measurement, customer-consent practices, content rules, and a sequence of tests. Marketing, product, customer service, legal, and technology teams may all have a role.

The mistake would be to interpret that work as evidence that the entire customer strategy must be reinvented.

Matt’s point is almost the opposite. Enterprises already understand their customers, lifecycle moments, and commercial objectives better than the RCS industry does. They do not need a telecom provider to explain churn to them. They need help translating what they already know into a channel with different capabilities and rules.

RCS may be unfamiliar. The business problems are not.

Now What

Start with the customer outcome, not the RCS demonstration.

Choose a problem the company already understands. Churn is one example. Onboarding, service, acquisition, loyalty, appointment management, and post-purchase support may be others. Identify the existing touchpoint, the intended customer action, and how the business measures success today.

Then determine what messaging can remove from the experience.

Can the customer act inside the thread instead of following a link? Can a button replace a search through an app? Can the customer ask a question rather than abandoning the offer? Can rich media explain something that previously required several paragraphs? Can the company answer the most common questions in the moment?

Translate the experience. Do not merely shrink the email.

Then measure the same business outcome through the new channel. Track reads, engagement, button activity, responses, and downstream behavior. The purpose is not to prove that customers pressed an RCS button. It is to determine whether fewer customers churned, more customers converted, or the interaction became easier.

Finally, operationalize it.

That means deciding where to invest technically and where not to invest. It means establishing governance, identifying the right mix of team members, and building a test-and-learn roadmap. It also means treating mobile messaging as more than a campaign channel owned by one isolated team.

That is the gap Matt is addressing through Mobile CX Partners, where he is a co-founder and managing partner. The firm works with enterprises and MarTech companies to define the role of mobile messaging, create technology roadmaps, establish governance, structure teams, and turn isolated experiments into operational programs. (MobileCX Partners)

Matt can be reached through Mobile CX Partners or on LinkedIn.

On a farm, the work does not care how sophisticated the process sounds. It only matters whether the process works.

Matt sees customer experience the same way. RCS brings new technology, analytics, and creative possibilities. But the job remains familiar: remove friction, reach customers where they already are, and make it easier for them to act.

The channel is new. The outcome is not.