The News
Twilio and Google have enabled Fresha, a global beauty and wellness booking platform, to adopt Rich Communication Services (RCS) for business messaging. The result is measurable customer engagement gains, including a 41.3% read rate and increased tips, reviews, and booking confirmations.
Analysis
Application developers are navigating a landscape where trust, interactivity, and deliverability are becoming core features of customer communications. Traditional SMS is showing its age amid rising consumer skepticism and message fatigue. RCS is positioned as the next evolution in messaging and could offer developers richer controls (verified branding, multimedia content, and two-way interactivity) without requiring mobile apps or user logins. According to theCUBE Research, developers increasingly seek programmable communications that deliver secure, responsive experiences at scale, a trend that Twilio’s RCS adoption directly supports.
From Notifications to Conversations
The Twilio-Fresha partnership exemplifies the movement from one-way alerts to high-fidelity brand interactions. By embedding RCS into Fresha’s multi-channel engagement strategy, Twilio aims to help transform simple appointment reminders into personalized, branded experiences. Developers may benefit from Twilio’s unified APIs and low-code deployment capabilities, which could provide faster rollout of new features with minimal disruption to existing pipelines. For platform builders, this means customer messaging is no longer an operational task but a core pillar of product design.
Legacy Messaging Falls Short of Business Outcomes
Historically, developers faced challenges balancing scale with trust. SMS had high deliverability but lacked security and interactivity. App-based messaging could offer personalization, but required user downloads and ongoing maintenance. RCS could bridge that gap, particularly for verticals like beauty, wellness, and local services where repeat engagement and verified trust directly impact conversion. Prior to adopting RCS, companies like Fresha were stuck in a cycle of plain-text communication that limited differentiation and failed to reflect brand identity.
Developer Implications of Build Trust-First Engagements
With Twilio’s orchestration of channels like RCS, email, voice, and WhatsApp through Flex, developers now have a pathway to build trust-first, omnichannel experiences without locking into proprietary ecosystems. While RCS adoption varies by geography and mobile carrier support, developers are still able to use fallback strategies (e.g., SMS or chat) while preparing for a broader RCS footprint. This evolution in communications should be approached as part of the customer experience lifecycle, not merely infrastructure, opening up the door to optimize for trust, interaction, and long-term retention.
Looking Ahead
As messaging channels mature and converge, the developer focus is shifting from transactional automation to experience-led design. Emerging standards like RCS may soon become baseline expectations for industries dependent on repeat bookings and verified identities.
For Twilio, this case study showcases its broader value proposition as a programmable communications backbone for enterprises seeking consistency and compliance across global markets. If adopted more widely, RCS could prompt a rethinking of engagement workflows across verticals (from healthcare to retail) where authenticated messaging can drive measurable outcomes.
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