3Cinteractive (3C), a provider of mobile marketing services for enterprise businesses, announced the first ever live North American deployment of brand-to-consumer (A2P) mobile messaging using Rich Communications Services (RCS) over the Sprint Network.

3C launched the messaging campaign earlier this month as part of a pilot program with a leading millennial retailer as part of the Google Early Access Program for RCS business messaging.

"This marks a major milestone in bringing rich, 'app-like' functionality to the mobile phone's native messaging capabilities and showcases the beginning of what's to come in terms of reimagining how customers interact with their favorite brands via mobile", states John Duffy, Founder and CEO of 3C.

The pilot program has been designed to utilize new features and functionality made available through the RCS standard, such as rich cards and suggested actions and replies—all of which enable more interactive and actionable engagements between brands and their customers.

As the costs for brands to engage customers continues to soar and competition with third party players for customer data intensifies, the ubiquity of messaging combined with the power of RCS will enable businesses to own a direct, rich conversation with their customers.

3C also recently announced the mobile industry's first RCS Engagement Platform that enables brands to build and deploy powerful A2P RCS messaging experiences. 3C's RCS Engagement Platform allows users to deliver RCS workflows to all customers on all supported devices, and manages the complexity of fragmented carrier and MaaP platform implementations. Next week, 3C will be on hand at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain to showcase the power of RCS for brands. For anyone attending MWC who would like to learn more about RCS, or to set up a session in Barcelona, email us at [email protected].