RCS Messaging on Salesforce: A Practitioner’s Guide

What is RCS Messaging? RCS is delivers a new standard of mobile messaging that delivers rich, interactive experiences across both Apple and Android products. Unlike SMS and MMS, RCS messages are capable of: Rich media: Delivers high-resolution media files instead of compressed images Engaging templates: Create content that drives action withcarousels, tap-through CTAs, and suggested actions. Verified branding : Build trust with a verified sender profile and company branding in your contact information. These updates bring new opportunities for marketers. With RCS, marketers now have more creative freedom and flexibility to deliver rich content experiences, two-way conversations, and personalized engagement to every customer no matter the device they use. How to get started with RCS This post is a practical guide to help you get started with confidence. There are a handful of configuration decisions to make upfront, and understanding them early means you can move faster and build more ambitiously once you’re underway. Configure your RCS Agent Before you send a single message, you’ll configure an RCS Agent — the identity and capability container for your brand on RCS. There are four dimensions to that configuration, each one shaping how your channel operates and scales. Think of these as your foundation. Set them up thoughtfully and everything else is execution. 1. Use Case Your options: OTP (One-Time Password) — for authentication and verification messages (passcodes, login confirmations) Transactional — for operational messages triggered by a customer action (order confirmations, shipping updates, appointment reminders) Promotional — for marketing messages (campaigns, offers, product announcements) Multi-use — for brands that send across more than one of the above categories Salesforce surfaces the required fields dynamically based on the country and use case combination to help guide compliance. If you’re running a mix of triggered transactional messages and promotional campaigns from the same brand, Multi-use is almost always the right call. Please note that Multi-use is not available in Brazil and India — in those markets, provision separate agents per use case. 2. Billing Category Choose between Conversational and Non-Conversational . Non-Conversational billing applies to one-way triggered messages (think order confirmations, shipping updates, appointment reminders). Conversational billing applies when the session includes inbound replies — whether from a human response or an AI agent exchange. Conversational billing availability varies by market and is rolling out in phases. Design your initial strategy around the billing model available in your market today, and revisit as the model expands. Map your use cases to billing categories before you build; the cost-model difference between the two is material at enterprise volume. 3. Market (Country) You provision your RCS agent for a specific market — the country whose carriers, compliance rules, and sender requirements your agent operates under. Match this to where your customers are. If you operate across multiple markets, you may need a separate agent per country. This choice is fixed per agent and can’t be changed after setup, so confirm your target market before provisioning. See Where RCS Is Available below for the current list. (Note: your agent’s market is distinct from where your message data is hosted — data hosting is managed on Google’s infrastructure and is a separate data-residency consideration. Loop in your legal and compliance teams on both.) 4. Capabilities Choose between Flow Messaging , Conversational Messaging , or both. Capabilities are enabled after your agent goes live and define what types of messages you can send. Flow Messaging unlocks rich media formats — cards, carousels, suggested replies, and action buttons — for triggered and journey-based sends. Conversational Messaging adds inbound reply handling and activates the two-way Agentforce path. You can enable both, and for a full-channel strategy, you’ll want to For more information about RCS setup, visit the help documentation . RCS for Enterprise Scale with Salesforce RCS on Salesforce is built on two foundational integrations. The first is a direct partnership with Google , ensuring Salesforce customers stay aligned with the evolution of the RCS ecosystem as the standard matures. The second is a two-way, high-scale connection with messaging aggregators that handles delivery and inbound routing across carriers globally — so your messages move reliably at enterprise volume in both directions. What makes this channel meaningfully different on Marketing Cloud Next is: Flow orchestration for journey-style engagement logic — triggered sends, wait-for-event branching, and decision splits based on delivery and read signals Conversational AI powered by Agentforce powers two-way conversations at scale Rich content formats — cards, swipeable carousels, suggested replies, and action buttons turn messages into brand experiences SMS fallback option that automatically routes messages when a recipient’s device doesn’t support RCS — so you’re never leaving reach on the table Three Ways to Get Started with RCS Use Case #1 — One-Way Transactional with Rich, Personalized Content Best for: Order confirmations, shipping updates, appointment reminders, account alerts RCS lets you send rich media that turn a transactional moment into a brand moment. A shipping confirmation can now show the product photo, a live tracking CTA, and a branded header — or a swipeable carousel of related products the customer might reorder — all delivered natively in the messaging app, without an app install or a browser. Using the Send RCS Message Invocable Action in Flow, you trigger a message from any automation entry point: a purchase event, a status change, a scheduled reminder. Merge fields pull in personalized text data — customer name, order number, or appointment time directly from your unified data. For richer, individualized visuals, on-demand flows and other data providers let you populate media dynamically at send time , so the image a customer sees can be specific to their order or profile. Create and manage your RCS message to get started with rich content authoring. Use Case #2 — Flow-Orchestrated Journeys with Engagement Branching Best for: Promotional campaigns, re-engagement journeys, multi-step nurture sequences A practical example: a promotional campaign that sends a carousel of featured products. The journey waits for a Read event. If the customer reads and doesn’t engage, a decision split routes them to a follow-up message with a different offer. If the message is Delivered but not read after 24 hours, the journey falls back to SMS. If it Fails (non-RCS device), the SMS fallback fires immediately. Flow’s Automation Event Library gives you access to a full set of RCS-specific wait events: Delivered , Read , Failed , Response , and Subscription . Each one becomes a decision point in your journey. See the full Automation Event Library in Flow . Every engagement event is pushed to Data 360, which means read rates and response rates feed back into the customer profile in real time. That data drives re-entry triggers, audience segmentation, and campaign performance analytics with a level of signal richness that opens up entirely new automation possibilities. Use Case #3 — Two-Way Conversational AI with Agentforce Best for: Post-purchase support, product discovery, appointment scheduling, live promotional Q&A When a customer replies to an RCS message, that inbound response routes through to Agentforce Service Agent via Salesforce’s unified agent communication protocol. The agent has access to the campaign context (the message the customer is responding to) plus the customer’s full unified profile from Data 360. That context is what makes the reply feel intelligent. The agent knows the customer just received a promotional offer for a product they’ve