Six months in, and “digital-first” isn’t a trend anymore. It’s just how things work now.

The businesses that built their customer relationships around in-person interactions—retail, banking, healthcare, hospitality—are scrambling to rebuild that trust through screens. Most of them, even the ones with decent digital teams, are getting it wrong.

The core problem isn’t technology. It’s identity.

When a brand texts you today, you get a gray bubble from a 10-digit number or some short code. No logo. No verification. No way to know if that “BANK ALERT” is actually from your bank or from someone who just bought a spoofed short code on the cheap. The FTC started tracking a surge in COVID-related scam texts back in March, and it hasn’t slowed down. In a world where phishing texts impersonate health agencies and delivery services, anonymous SMS isn’t just a branding limitation—it’s a liability signal.

The Verification Gap #

Think about email for a second. For all its problems—and there are many—email at least shows you a sender name, a domain, and some level of authentication if DKIM/DMARC is configured. SMS has none of that infrastructure. It was designed in a different era, for a different threat model, and nobody bothered to update the spec.

RCS Business Messaging changes this. A brand registers as a verified agent through the Jibe platform; messages then arrive with a logo, brand colors, and a verified sender badge. The recipient knows immediately who’s texting them—and crucially, that a third party validated the identity, not the sender themselves.

This is more than cosmetic polish. During a pandemic where scammers routinely impersonate health agencies, that verified checkmark separates messages that get read from ones that get flagged as spam.

Rich Messaging Fills the In-Person Gap #

The other piece is capability. SMS delivers plain text. Links work, but the interaction model boils down to “click a URL and leave the conversation.” Every time a customer needs to do something more than reply with a word, the experience pushes them to a different channel. That friction costs you.

RCS supports rich cards (images, descriptions, action buttons), carousels for browsing, suggested replies for quick responses, and read receipts so brands know messages actually landed. Think of it as a lightweight app embedded in the messaging thread—not anything SMS could ever support.

For a retailer that lost its fitting room: a customer can browse a carousel of products, tap through to details, and complete a purchase—all inside the messaging thread. For a healthcare provider: appointment scheduling with suggested time slots instead of a “call this number” dead end. The interaction patterns that used to require a store visit or a phone call can now happen in the channel where people already spend their time.

I think the pandemic just made obvious what was already happening. In-person interactions in banking, retail, and customer service had been declining for years before any of this. COVID removed the option entirely, and suddenly the gap between where customers lived (messaging) and what brands did there (basically nothing rich or verified) became impossible to ignore.

The Carrier Problem (Real, but Not Fatal) #

Let’s be honest about where RCS falls short in 2020: adoption runs carrier-dependent, and the rollout lands uneven. Android’s Messages app supports RCS on most major carriers, but coverage varies significantly by region. If a recipient’s carrier doesn’t support RCS yet, the message degrades to SMS—no rich features, no verified branding.

This isn’t a reason to sit on your hands. It’s a reason to design for graceful degradation. Build the rich RCS experience for capable recipients; make sure the SMS fallback still communicates the essentials. RCS-capable devices grow every quarter, and the brands building this infrastructure now avoid the scramble when coverage reaches critical mass.

Early adopters always pay a tax. Accept it.

Why the Timing Actually Matters #

The pandemic created urgency, but the underlying need predates it. Customers now expect verified, interactive, branded experiences across every digital channel, because social media and app ecosystems already trained them to. Social media has this. Email has (some of) it. Messaging—the most personal channel, the one with the highest open rates—sat frozen in 1995 while every other medium evolved.

Brands that invest in branded messaging now aren’t just solving a COVID problem. They’re building the communication infrastructure for whatever channel expectations look like in three years. And given how fast those expectations shifted in the last six months, I wouldn’t wait to find out.