51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ

Transcript

Hi everyone and welcome to Experience League Live. I’m Sandra Hausmann, a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer on the Digital Experience Product Enablement team here at 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ, and I’ll be your host today. As always, feel free to say hi in the chat, drop your questions as we go, and share your thoughts. We love to hear from you and we’re here to address your questions. Today’s episode is all about mobile engagement and we’ll be diving into two exciting channels, WhatsApp and RCS. What they are, how they work, how to set them up, and what they can do for your customer experience. But before we get into all that and I introduce today’s guests, just a quick word for anyone who’s new to Experience League. Experience League is your go-to hub for all things self-serve at 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ. Whether you’re looking for documentation, community discussions, how-to videos, tutorials, or past episodes of this very show, it’s all there. And if you want to keep the conversation going after today’s session, we’ve got an Ask Me Anything with our 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ experts coming up on October 15th from 8 to 9 a.m pacific time right on the community forum. You can join us by heading to experienceleague.adobe.com. And now without further ado, let me bring in my guests. My first guest is Travis Jordan. Travis is a principal product manager here at 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ and really the mastermind behind our WhatsApp and RCS integration. Welcome Travis.

Hey Travis, it’s great to have you here. Now also joining us is Nikhil Sharma, our senior engineering manager at 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ. Nikhil and his team are the ones who actually built these features and brought them to life. Welcome back Nikhil.

Nikhil, it’s always important to have you on the show. Thanks, and so since this is Experience League, we’re going to introduce you not with what you’re doing because I already mentioned that, but actually talk a bit about your fun facts.

Travis, let me start with you. I hear you once dreamed of becoming an astronaut. What inspired that dream and how did you end up in product management instead? Great question. You know, a lot like young boys, I always wanted to be an astronaut, right, since I can remember. And it wasn’t just kind of a dream. I mean, I attended space camp. I registered with NASA to get these packets in the mail where I could study how to become an astronaut. I spent times gazing at the stars. I mean, I was set on it. And then I think it was around junior high heading into high school. I realized that one of the prerequisites to be an astronaut was you had to have extreme superb math skills. And I realized at that point I might be out. So then I shifted and kind of set my sights elsewhere. But yeah, obviously, and then like many of us, our careers take a lot of different turns. But yeah, wanted to be an astronaut but settled on the next best career of product management. Here I am. Perfect. So are you still holding out for one of those commercial space flight seats, maybe someday? Honestly, I’ve been thinking about it. So yeah, maybe that will be my opportunity. Awesome. Looking forward to hearing on the news about that. And you better give us a heads up before you go. Nikhil, so it’s great to have you back on the show. I know, Travis, you’ve been on shows before. Nikhil, you’ve been on a show with me. And you told me recently that your smartwatch said you burned 400 calories while biking with your son. But it forgot to mention that you were also chasing him all over the playground. So can you tell us what that adventure looked like? Sounds like quite a workout, almost like a, I don’t know, triathlon almost.

I mean, my fitness tracker is generous enough to even count 400. And because I think I end up burning a lot, just chasing him running after him. And these days, it’s like, it’s fun. It’s fun. So soon you can start adding the swimming as well, then you have a full try.

I’ll be my fitness tracker be the happiest. I’m still out of breath even better. Yeah. That’s awesome. My kids, unfortunately, aren’t that young anymore. I can’t chase them. I’d get a lot more workouts. Okay, so let’s get started. You two have been working together a lot on this feature. And I thought, let’s set the scene. Travis, can you tell us a bit about what’s the driving factor? Why did we add WhatsApp and RCS to Journey Optimizer? Yeah, great question, Sandra. And in fact, if I could just share just a couple of slides to answer that question. You know, one of the things we have an opportunity to do as a product manager is to talk with a lot of customers and to hear their needs and hear their concerns and their questions. And as I started to talk with customers, they’re starting to become a set of themes that surfaced. We realized that number one, customers want richer, more interactive mobile messaging experiences, right? So gone are the days where we have just a simple message and maybe a link. I think customers, our customers, our brands are expecting more to engage their end users or customers. Secondly, what we found is customers want deeper analytics like read receipts, also better controls to optimize their own performance for their content. And then lastly, and this has been most prevalent, is customers really want to improve their open rates or conversion rates, and really just their consumer confidence with branded and verified messaging. And what do I mean by that? And we’ll get into that in a little bit more details. But I think we’ve all been there where we’ve received a message on our phone, maybe it’s an SMS message, and we don’t know if it’s coming from that brand. We don’t know if that’s really a message from Nike or from Walgreens or from any brand, right? We don’t know if it’s coming in from them or someone else. And so spam is prevalent. And so customers want to do anything they can to mitigate that spam, and then also to increase their open rates and engagements. And along with that, I’ll share just out of those needs, we’ve created a high level vision for where we are and where we’re heading in the future. And so if you go to the left of this screen, you can see over the last, I would say, two years or so, we’ve built one way outbound messaging with SMS and MMS channels that we have sophisticated opt in and opt out, consent management capabilities, integration across multiple SMS providers, and we’ve seen tremendous success. That’s kind of been our foundation.

And then this last year, we’ve been really focused on adding new channels. If you see the middle here, we’ve kind of been focusing on expanding and adding new channels. And so that includes things like WhatsApp. That includes channels such as Rich Communication Services or RCS, along with other channels, because we want to be able to have our customers meet their end users where they are. And now as we move into the future, we want to take these marvelous set of channels, this wonderful foundation, and build upon that with not just outbound messaging, but now two-way messaging, more interactivity with rich media, and so customers can really engage with their end users and drive increased engagement. And so that paints just a little bit of a picture of where we are today. And yeah, go ahead. Oh, you’re already going into that. But one thing, when I came across RCS a couple of months ago for the first time before our feature launch, just before we launched the feature, and a friend of mine wasn’t receiving my text and she said, are you using RCS? And I’m like, what’s RCS? So and then the next day I was like, oh yeah, we’re going to launch this feature. And I’m like, oh, that’s RCS. I wonder, I mean, we have a lot of our viewers, our marketers, they’re probably aware of RCS, but RCS is basically an involvement of SMS, right? Yeah, you got it. And so if you look at channels like, you know, WhatsApp’s been around for a while, and now they have a massive presence, over 1 billion active users. And that’s per week, right? So just a massive footprint and presence. And that’s owned by Meta, it’s a closed platform, and it’s an app that you download. And now if you look at RCS, to answer your question, this is owned by Google, although it’s different in the way that it’s implemented. It’s implemented by the mobile carriers, such as AT&T, such as Verizon, such as T-Mobile. And it’s also delivered natively in the Messages app. So unlike Meta and WhatsApp, you don’t have to download the app. It’s already, once again, we’re all receiving RCS messaging right now without us even knowing, at least many of us, if we use the native messaging apps inside on an Android phone or an iOS device. And so what we’ve seen over the last six months is, iOS has adopted this technology, and Apple has adopted this technology, along with these providers and these carriers, rather, adopting this, we’re seeing a tremendous rapid growth in North America. So what we were seeing is brands were reaching out to us. They still are regularly, every week, and saying, what are you doing with RCS? How are you going to support RCS in the future? And so we’ve been preparing for that and have some exciting things to share with you today around RCS. But yeah, to your point, Sandra, it really is considered the next generation of SMS with rapid growth specifically expected in North America, because SMS is so prevalent there, or here in North America. And let me add a couple of things there, like as you rightly pointed out, RCS, which is Rich Communication Services, it built into SMS apps on Android devices and now on iOS as well, through Google messages and carriers as Travis shared, but basically it upgrades the traditional SMS into more richer app-like experiences without needing a separate app. So on your devices only, be it Android or iOS, sorry, you don’t need a separate app. It will bring all the capabilities and yeah, and that’s the next, well, let’s dive into the next slide where we capture what all these richer experiences and all these are, but yeah. Sorry, one question, because you said RCS is available or very prevalent in the US or North American market. What about the other markets? I’m sure we have viewers from other regions. And by the way, if you guys, I mean, you viewers have any questions, ask them, we’ll go into the demo on how to set it up and use it as well. So stick around. But if you have any questions, please put it in the chat, we’ll answer them. And also let us know where you’re joining us from. That would be very interesting, especially since these services might or might not be available or different than regions. So coming back to RCS, are they available, is RCS available in other regions? Is it available internationally? Absolutely, absolutely. And not only is it available, but it’s prevalent. In fact, in addition to North America, we’re seeing tremendous growth in various parts of Asia, also in Europe, in various parts of the world. So one of the things we can share is after this, we can share some of those implementation numbers and kind of where they’re higher, where they’re lower. But yes, it’s definitely being implemented across all the major carrier or most of the major carriers across the world today. And we have customers or prospects who we both are discussing kind of daily. So RCS is global wherever, let’s say Android plus Google, Google messages are in use, be it North America, Europe, Latin, Asia, Pacific and everyone. So it’s definitely stronger in Android adoption markets. But now with iOS adoption or support for RCS, it’s going even like broader outreach to support globally all the rich messaging.

I’ll say it this way. As we’ve had conversations with both Meta and Google, they’re going after the same market, which is a worldwide global audience. And so I want to make it clear for us, we’re not leaning or biasing towards one or the other. We want to make sure that we provide multiple channels for you that work best for your organization. And so they have different strengths, they have different weaknesses. And today we’ll talk about both of those. But yeah, when you talk about the with our partners, they’re definitely going after the full global market. I think that’s a great opportunity to provide once again, these richer messages kind of as Nikhil mentioned previously, if you look on the left here on your screen, you can see kind of our traditional SMS messages, which have served its purpose and will continue to be relevant over the next several years. But but but we do see that there’s a shift once again, expectation. I mentioned the unverified number. Today, if you receive an SMS message, it may look like this where you just see a phone number. If you compare that to what you would see with a to the right of your set on the screen, an RCS message, which is the first screen, or a WhatsApp message, you see the name of the brand. But not only that, you see a verification. And so that’s verified by Meta and or Google, depending on your WhatsApp or RCS, as a legitimate brand and platform, or sorry, as a legitimate brand for that platform. And so that’s a key focus area. But obviously, as you have these, the branded and verification, along with richer interactive experiences, what do you think is going to happen, right? So what what the big bet is that, okay, there’s going to be more open rates, are going to be there’s going to be greater conversions, greater engagements with brands and brand loyalty and things like that. So anyway, it’s quite it’s very exciting. More and more trust as well. I mean, I see the spam picking up, especially on SMS, but also on WhatsApp, although, having said that, I’m in the US market, and I’ve not come across any, let’s say marketing on WhatsApp. Is it because it’s not picked up yet? Or are there any restrictions? Yeah, great, great point. And so in your right, I so so far, I personally seen two brands that have come through. So it’s very early on it, but it’s growing fast. And so the reason why it’s growing fast, once again, is because of the major carriers are just now adopting. And that’s just happening over the last several months. And so in the United States, for AT&T, which is right behind them, and that’s expected to go sometime this year, potentially next year, once that is once AT&T supports RCS for business, it’s going to explode very, very, very fast. And so yeah, what you’ll see is kind of a trickling. I would anticipate a trickling over the next several months and then over the next year or so. In fact, one of the quotes we received from an estimate is that 75% of brands will adopt RCS next year.

So we think we think it’ll be a slow ramp initially, but once all the carriers are there, which they’re almost there, it will go quickly move very fast. And as you can see on the screen, apart from the cost ROI, the features, support and other things, trust and security are two major factors as you pointed out, for both WhatsApp also supports end to end encryption and verified business accounts to build over some confidence. RCS also has a verified sender ID and brand specific rules to reduce spam or scam concerns, which there were with SMS as Travis shared, and it’s there on the screen. So trust secure, like both the channels are more trusted and secure as compared to the native simple text messaging or SMS. And what about WhatsApp? With WhatsApp, I haven’t, I personally haven’t received any marketing messages via WhatsApp. Again, I’m in the US market. What’s the situation with WhatsApp? That’s a good question. So if you’re outside of the US market, you’re likely to see several marketing messages. And the adoption in North America has been slower than it has been outside of the United States specifically. And so because of that, we’re still learning how to use WhatsApp for marketing purposes. And so for Metta, it’s really important that the messages that are going out don’t come across as spammy. And I think as North America, as we particularly United States first started using it, it was coming across a little bit spammy. So for now, Metta has said, hey, if you’re message to a North America phone number, it will not be received. So that’s one of the limitations for WhatsApp inside of the United States is you can do transactional messages. But but but marketing messages are limited right now in North America. But AJ, from AJ side, we support our customers are like various global brands. So whether WhatsApp is WhatsApp has a very high reach, like I think couple of billion monthly users, or even a brand, a global brand from North America have presence in APAC Europe, very active on WhatsApp in North America, they are excited to see what’s RCS comes in picture and what all RCS brings to the table. So that’s why from AJ side, Travis and I are daily that okay, this feature in WhatsApp in RCS, we are going we’re supporting both in all like, and with all the feature sets and the rich messaging they support. And I want to say Sandra that that SM and then we’ll get to our demo, which is I think the exciting part. But I want to decide that the SMS channel continues to be a foundational messaging approach and will be for for the next several years. And so what we’ve seen is for customers, there’ll be a little bit of a hybrid implementation where they’ll, you know, likely send some SMS messages, or have some type of fallback to an SMS message. And so you’ll see these these kind of run in parallel for a little while, as brands start to adopt these and experiment within journey optimizer, get metrics to see what works best. But yeah, we see we see there being a hybrid approach for for the next several years. Travis, I know you’ll be talking about the roadmap after the demo, but maybe we can ask answer Kushal. These question. He asks any plans to support two way RCS and AJO using reactions? Yeah, great question. So let’s, if you don’t mind, I could I could just hit that slide now, Sandra. Yeah, very good. And then let’s jump right into the demo from there. So I will say these are targets. And so anything that I share with the roadmap, these are not guarantees, but these are our targets and our directions. But when you look at 2026, there’s there’s a couple of key areas we’ll be focusing on. And to answer your question, if you see the second item under 2026, two way conversational messaging will be key. And so that that is across WhatsApp, RCS, and SMS. So we want to provide a two way conversational messaging solution that you can optimize or to deliver those engagements for that’s transactional, or whether that’s a marketing type of interaction. And so yes, so you have an RCS what’s called suggested replies.

And those are one of one form of two way conversational message that we would look to support. And then you also have things in WhatsApp, you have your quick reply buttons and things like that we would look to support as well. So those are examples of the types of two way conversational messages look to surface. And so that’s that’ll be a big focus in 2026. As we’ve, you see here, we’ve the foundation, we delivered our WhatsApp channel, that’s focused on outbound, primarily what we have today, along with some some simple keyword responses, and also some opt in and opt out. But primarily opt in, it’s a little bit of inbound feedback coming back. And then this year, we also delivered the RCS channel basic messages. And then I want to emphasize that the first part of next year will be heads down and excited to deliver the RCS channel for multimedia messages. And so look out for that announcement. That will be big time and very exciting. So anyway, yeah, to answer your question, next year to our big focuses will be a native RCS channel, and also to a conversational messaging across SMS WhatsApp.

I think that answered Ricardo’s question as well. Perfect. Let’s, let’s see the system. Let’s dive in. I’m excited. I’m excited to these are the things I live for. So let’s go ahead and just dive right into 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Journey Optimizer. You can see her I’m on the home screen. And so I am going to demo a couple of different things. The first thing I’m going to demo is a use case with WhatsApp. Right. So in this case, we have a fictional brand. This is called Luma Cruises. They offer cruises around the world across the Mediterranean. And they want to deliver both marketing messages and transactional messages in WhatsApp. Right. So let’s go ahead and dive in how they first configured that WhatsApp message in Journey Optimizer. And then secondly, we’ll dive into the journey to show how our messages were set up. So first, we’ll go ahead and head to channels. And then under channels, you’ll see these new, these new options here. And I can click WhatsApp credentials. And under WhatsApp credentials, you can see here I’ve created this. These are pre built assets. You can see here what we have here. So these credentials provide a secure connection between 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ and meta to grab the WhatsApp business account information to send that message and to manage that message. So once again, you can see things like you’d enter your business account ID, your business name, your sender ID. And then you also have some some other information that’s coming back as metadata as well. Nikhil, do you want to emphasize, share with the audience a little bit more about this configuration, how this works, and some additional details on this piece? Yeah, sure. So at this step, basically, I’m bringing my meta business portfolio, also my WhatsApp account from that portfolio and connecting it with Agile. Right now, it’s a form base like you bring your long lived auth token, and the business ID, then ago connects deeply with meta API is to pull up the business account the sender IDs, you can select the phone number, which phone number you want to select, which is already provisioned on meta. Plus, you can see there are some more metadata, like you can see what’s the throughput assigned to my sender ID and what’s the quality rating, because meta also have a ramp up plan with each WhatsApp sender ID. So even if you provision a new number, which is not yet qualified or ready to go for the all standard or high throughput, then then it’s you in Agile, you can see which which config or which sender ID to pick up to support your use cases, be it a batch and blast or transactional, or marketing or utility. So yeah, at this step, you configure your account and you can see all the metadata needed for you to decide the next campaign and to create your marketing campaign accordingly. And one of the things on the roadmap that I showed was a item called WhatsApp embedded signup. That’s our next evolution of what I’m sharing with you today. And that it’s going to be more of a really it’s an embedded experience where you do a kind of a WYSIWYG editor, a walkthrough. And it’s much faster, much easier. Right now, you are required to, you know, you do have to have a WhatsApp business account. And you have to find this information and add it here in the form. Our next iteration coming out next year, first part of next year, this onboarding will be much faster, much simpler. So we’re excited for that. And that will be similar to your any WhatsApp login or meta login, like the embedded signup is the next one. We have a question from Ricardo. Are we able to set up the WhatsApp configuration with a test number provided by meta or only a verified number? Yeah, so we will once your account is connected, whatever numbers are there in your WhatsApp account on meta, be it a test number or a verified sender ID, all can be used. And will you can, there’s a drop down in the config screen where you can see that okay, bring me like, where we pull up the all the sender IDs from your meta account, you can select if it’s a test number, you can select the test number. If it’s a verified sender ID, you can you will be able to select that it’s only that test number will be like the sending rate and the quality ratings are being controlled by meta. But in Agio you can select and choose whichever you want. Perfect. Excellent. Okay, let’s go to the next step. So once we set up our credential made that secure connection between 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ and Agio, or sorry 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ and meta, we then create a webhook. We introduced webhooks this year. And this allows us to have a quicker, more real time response back from inbound messages. And so we’re really excited about this piece. So in here, once you set this webhook, the webhooks do a couple of different things. One is we can configure a webhook to be able to respond or listen to the responses from the end users for opt in and opt out. So let’s say for example, your users to stop or opt in or opt out. You configure that, you configure those keywords here. Let me go and click edit here. And so you can see here you can configure opt out, you can configure opt in, you can add a keyword, let’s say cancel, right? Then you can add different keywords for opt out, right? So add those. You can also add a reply message. So thank you for opting out. And then once that keyword is entered by a user that you’ve configured, then this response is sent back to them. And so webhooks allows us to have that real time engagement for those inbound responses. This is also what helps us to deliver read receipts and other types of delivery reporting that WhatsApp offers natively. And we deliver that through Journey Optimizer.

Go ahead Nikhil. No, I’m saying if Travis, if you pull up the, there are several inbound categories that we support like as Travis shared, there’s opt out, opt in, help, default. This will allow you to control if there’s a static message to any of your keywords or if you want to more control the default message to any unknown or any keyword. You can configure all that here. On the same note, there are a couple of questions from Kushal. Exactly. I just wanted to bring them up Nikhil, so Kushal is asking about setting send times. For example, he wants to send during business hours and he wants to know if you can configure that when you set up the channel. I think that also applies for frequency rules, right? So go ahead. Right now at this point, Kushal, we are configuring the channel and connecting it with AJO. We do support sending times or like the best send time for any channel. This is being captured around the channel activation or channel action, be it in Journey or Campaign. Some of these are controlled around send time optimization via business or frequency rule that we call. But yeah, at that step or the message authoring step close to that, you can control when to target which end user, depending upon their several rules, be it their region or like time zone and other things. So send time optimization today is not captured or configured in the channel setting for WhatsApp or RCS or even SMS, but it’s more as a separate feature which you’ll see on the left now, the business rules where you can configure how many messages to send, when to send, and there is a lot of send time optimization support coming up for all these channels already. Yeah, I’ll add to that. Thank you, Nikhil. I think when you look at business rules, as you know, if you’ve used business rules before, you can do frequency capping or quiet hours for email. That is expanding to SMS and WhatsApp in the very near future. In fact, right now, I believe it’s on track to be delivered in October. So the hope is to have this by the end of the year, if not the first part of next year, so that you can manage those what’s called sometimes quiet hours in the industry. So that capability is very close to being delivered in the next few months. And then as Nikhil said, kind of a little bit further down the roadmap next year, we’re also exploring send time optimization, or STO, which involves a little bit more AI and predictive analytics to be able to deliver at the right time. So between both of those, I think you’ll have what you need for optimizing your messaging. Great.

Okay. So yeah, once we’ve set up this webhook, and now I add this webhook to the meta UI inside of the portal. And now I’ve established that connection between 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ and those inbound messaging and back to meta as well. So the last step, and I’m not going to show you how to do this, because if you’ve used AJO, you’re familiar with this, you do have what’s called a channel configuration, used to be called a channel surface. And so just really quickly, here’s where you create a channel configuration, and then you select that configuration API credential that you created. And so now that we have those three setups, we have the channel configuration, which references the API credential, and the API credential, and the webhook reference each other. Now we’re all set up and ready to go from a configurations standpoint. So let’s roll into the journey itself. Now that we have those three things set up. So once again, if you remember the use case, we’re looking at Luma cruises. And Luma wants to deliver a set of messages to the users once they set up for a cruise, when they sign up and register for a cruise. Right. So you can see here in this journey that I’ve kind of pre-configured. Here on the left, you have your audience. And so once again, this audience may include all those that have signed up for a cruise during a certain amount, certain period of time. And then the first message that the user wants to send out is a trip confirmation. And I’ll show you how that’s done in just a second. A trip confirmation, and then we want to wait for a few days, and then we want to offer them an upsell, right. So that may be dinner package, or that may be right, an upgraded room. And so in this case, this is a marketing message and I move to more of a, sorry, a transactional message to start with and a marketing message here. So this is the nature of my journey that I have to start with. So once, now that I have kind of the straw man of this journey set up, let’s dive into the message itself. Let’s look at the trip confirmation.

And so you can see here, by the way, this is where I’ve referenced that channel configuration. And that’s critical, right. So that’s an important part that you do have to, for all the steps that we did before, this is what connects the steps you did before with your journey that you’re building or your campaign that you’re building. So let’s go and click edit content.

And you can see this wonderful, wonderful user interface that Nikhil and his team built. And would you like to talk a little bit about kind of how that works? And I have our message templates here from WhatsApp, kind of how we’ve integrated the message templates over to Journey Optimizer. I can kind of move the screen around a little bit as you navigate and talk through this, but can you take just a minute to describe WhatsApp templates and how we’ve integrated that into our UI? Sure. And that’s the one of the reasons when we spent some time on the configuring the WhatsApp accounts. So once it’s one time, once you configured your WhatsApp account, then we will be connecting with all meta APIs for which are there for different use cases. As you can see on this screen, we built a Luma template in our meta account. We use the placeholder image as a media sample, also a header and the body which has variables in it. And once it is created in meta, you can see all the templates in your meta account, which are either active or rejected from meta security policies. But yeah, there’s like on this screen, these are actively and quality rating approved and there are some rejected. Now let’s see on the AJO screen once as Travis was… By the way, sorry Nikhil, how long does it take for this message to be approved generally? Within 24 hours, these templates can be approved from meta, but there are some custom policies which you can apply on your meta account. But yeah, overall within 24 hours is the time which meta provides that by then your templates will be validated or approved or rejected. And it can be done within minutes based on how much like significant. And then once approved, I now am able to select it from my dropdown. The moment you select your category, we’ll list all the approved… Like we support the types of categories which are there in meta, as you can see these categories on meta screen. But once you select it, let’s say if you select utility, it will bring all the utility approved and active templates from there. It will not bring the content because content you put up in meta was just a placeholder, but it will bring a visualization that now that this template has a media content and which media content is… It’s a video or video URL. And once you put any image URL, be it your own public hosted or it can come from our AEM assets as well, then we’ll show the rendering of that image or even it’s a video or location or PDF or GIF. All media contents are supported. Body is also coming from your template. And apart from that, you can see in this template, there’s a variable. So now, not just pulling up the template from meta and substituting or associating the media content to it, but we also support all AEP, RTCDP personalization. So you can select any personalization attribute offers decisions or even any segment or contextual attribute to be passed in that first variable. Like whole personalization editor will be available at this time. And then you can select whichever content or attribute you want to set. You can type some native here. If you go back, I think this… Yeah, this is the one. But if you say this just on this screen, Travis, if you scroll down and just let’s say if you type first name in the lower, instead of clicking on the personalization icon, you can select anything. The rendering will be available. At this time, you can also simulate your content, the simulate your… I think we are all aware of how simulation works in SMS or email. Same in WhatsApp also, you can select a test profile and it will start simulating. So on this screen, we have a very tight integration with everything. There’s a question on transactional messages on WhatsApp. But yeah, we already selected that…

Before we get to that, can I ask something about the variables? So could I put the code for the data that I would normally add now here in AJO, could I add that in the WhatsApp template already? Yes, no, not template. If you go to the… Let’s go to the template screen in Meta. So in Meta, in the template that we created on Meta, there is a variable.

You can set 10 variables and this just like parenthesis one is coming in AJO. You can substitute anything in place of one, be it your first name, profile ID, or you can even write a code in personalization editor to use the helper functions or any… However, you are using personalization editor in email, SMS or any other channel, it can be used here. So I basically…

Yeah, it’s a placeholder then right here, you’d go to personalization. I’m on a demo account here, so we’re seeing some kind of error, but once you come here and you click the personalization editor, that pulls up the personalization editor, you can see all the variables, you can see all your data from AEP and you’re able to select whatever variable you want. And then once you select it, it then shows right here. And then to Nikhil’s point, now that you have that, you can also simulate that content, select a test account and make sure it’s pulling in, in this case, first name and it’s showing a first name that way. Okay, we have a couple of questions. Kushal, I’ll get back to the… We’ll get back to the RCS question a bit later, but we have a couple of questions with regards to WhatsApp. So Nikhil, you already saw that one. Kushal is asking, what about transactional messaging? Do those need to be approved by Meta as well for WhatsApp? So if it’s template based, right, there’s a selection here. You can select marketing utility or even authentication for OTP. These categories are already there. If there’s a template coming up with any of these categories and already available in Meta, you can do that. We don’t support directly using the send APIs and send just any message from AJI. What we support, you can create a transactional template with a placeholder message and use either transactional journeys or API triggered campaign to send low latency messaging from AJO over your WhatsApp. But yeah, those are… But those templates would have to be approved as well, right? So any template, no matter if it’s marketing or transactional, would need to be approved by Meta. Yeah, you got it. The categories are supported in AJO and we pull template there, substitution of that content can be like, can be written from AJ. You can see here in the term that they use for transactional is utility. And so you can see here, some of these are marketing templates and some of these are utility or transactional ones. You know, authentication for OTP kind of messaging, all these are like all three will be supported. Yeah. Speaking of language, you saw the language field there, DD75 asks, what would happen when using add language? Doesn’t the translation happen on Meta or does it translate? Yeah, no, this is totally correct. Translation will happen only in Meta, but we support multilingual in AJO overall. So if your template was created and supporting all the languages, you can select that language to just render the content here. It will not be delivered in Spanish, it will not be delivered in English. Like it will be delivered in your configured language coming from Meta template only, but based on the multilingual support, you can just render the content and see it here. For example, in this one, it’s a, we support both Italian and English in our template. So some of the words are coming there and the content is being designed there. Selecting the add language, you can change the overall view of this screen in AJ. Okay, perfect. Let’s continue. Yes, let’s go for a few minutes. So we’ll cruise through, hey, how’d you like that? Pun intended. We’ll cruise through this and we’ll get the next use case. So upsell, once again, this would be a different message, same concept though I’m now selecting a different template that was already approved and I can do the same type of thing inside of there. So now I have my two messages set and as we talked about, you have all the native channel capabilities available to you, including personalization, the ability to select your assets, content simulation, experimentation, you can create experiments and also reporting out of the box. And so once, so from a reporting standpoint, once I save this and I publish this, now I can see right out, right in Journey Optimizer, I don’t need to go to Meta. I can see things like delivery reports. I can see read receipts. All that data is going to come into reports in the same way that you see your other channels. And so you can see how those reports are coming back and how those deliveries are working out, both the 24 hour reports and also the longer term reporting as well. So let’s go ahead and jump into RCS, unless Nikhil, is there anything else that I might’ve missed that we should cover specifically for WhatsApp before we jump over to RCS? We can go on, we do support consent, opt out, everything, but all the reports, reporting, read receipts, consent, opt in, opt outs are being logged against a profile in AP for further retargeting or any reports. So yeah, this is very natively and tightly coupled with your profile in AP. How we support other channels, WhatsApp is also Is that also, because that was a question Kushal had, Kushal asked, when leader opts out for RCS in this case, is it the same thing? Yes. For RCS also, we follow the same whenever I, as a end user, if I respond back with stop or start to a business sender ID, which belongs to RCS and configured in AJO, then my profile in AP will be updated with the actual consent value if it’s opt out or opt in so that you can use for further retargeting and consent support. Perfect. Yep. And that’s managed at the profile level. So you could look at a profile and see, okay, what’s their value? What’s their opt in preference? Yes or no. And so, yeah, we collect that immediately. And then before sending out a message, we’re of the profiles in which they have opted in or send message to them if they’ve opted out. That value is no, then we would not send those messages to those profiles. But sender ID as we do in SMS, in case brands have multiple sender IDs for different campaigns, if I opted out from one, I will be only, actually my profile will be opted out for that sender ID only and not the whole brand. So I can follow the rest of the communication accordingly.

Okay. Let’s dive into the RCS use case. Sound good Nikhil, Sandra? Yes, we’re ready.

So for this one, we’re going to actually create a different type of journey for that. So as you can imagine, once again, you may have a preferred channel difference, right? So for example, you may have in certain areas of the world, you may want to deliver these messages like a trip confirmation and also the cruise upsell. You may want to deliver that to WhatsApp for a certain audience. Or if the preferred channel is RCS with an SMS fallback, you can deliver the message via RCS. So this just demonstrates how you could leverage the power of Journey Optimizer to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. And so let’s dive into, we’ve talked about once again, how we did the WhatsApp message and how that was configured. Let’s now dive into RCS. And so before I dive in, look at the message, let’s step back in a minute and look at how this was configured.

Now, if you remember, I showed the roadmap just recently, two months ago, we released the ability for customers and brands to be able to integrate with an RCS aggregator or third party that may be Infobip, it may be Twilio. We now give you the capability to integrate with that RCS provider and then edit that message with personalization and all those native channel capabilities we talked about, and then now publish that in AJO and receive those messages. So that is it. So what I’m showing you today, along with what I showed you previously is available today. And so this, what I’m sharing is our very first iteration of RCS. And I do want to emphasize that, like I said, we just released what’s called basic messages out of the box, which we will be reselling. And then also the multimedia messages, which is the native channel will release next year. So with our first iteration, you can connect with a provider. So in this case, it’s very similar to what we saw before with WhatsApp. So I’m going to create a, it’s an SMS API credential for now. And so what I do in here, so I’m going to select custom. And so this was a release we made, like I said, a couple of months ago. This custom feature allows you to do two things. You can connect to either a non-standard SMS provider that maybe we don’t provide out of the box, or you can connect to any RCS provider and send a message that way. So in this case, I’ve selected custom because I want to send an RCS message and I want to utilize Sencha’s conversation API. And so I’m going to enter that URL here. I’m going to add the provider app ID for my app. I’m going to configure my auth type. And by the way, we have multiple authentication types, API, MAC, OAuth, JWT, no authentication. And we recently released MTLS support for this as well. I can add my custom header parameters for that custom data. And then I can add this message payload. And so this is my provider payload that basically tells in this case, Sencha to say, okay, this is kind of the template or what we want this message to come back and look like that we can configure as kind of a basic envelope that we’re going to send over to over to Sencha in this case. So once that, yes, one, but if you see if you scroll down to the JSON, what, like here, we are configuring card type of RCS. RCS supports multiple message types like beat card, carousel, simple text. So card if like, there are multiple scenarios, but you can see the actual right now it’s more dishonest, there’ll be more richer UI native coming up in future. But here, we configured the structure. There are, we added some substitutions or variables which needs to be added up in the message as you will see in the next step. But we support whether it’s card, carousel, the power of this step is that once you configure, then you can reuse this configuration in different messages with different incoming data coming to these like variables. So the different options we have card, carousel, etc. We would have to create one API credential per option. Yeah, because you can create one API credential, let’s say per card type. And that can have one to end messages or campaigns with different media URL, post back data or messages or anything, any substitutions. But yeah, if you have a different structure, you can configure as many as you can. But if it’s the same one, it can be reused multiple times. And we can have some user visit. And the payload is provided through the provider, right? Okay, perfect. Yeah. So and I’d like to mention that. So on this side of the page, once again, I’m with our first iteration, you’re doing some of this authoring inside of cinch. So with the message composer here, for example, I pulling this up, I have my message that I’ve created inside of cinch, you can see here, the special, let’s go to RCS. And once again, we have our cruise confirmation. And I can add that message here. And to your point. So if you go to code, now I can see kind of that payload here for this particular message. Right? Copy and paste it in. That’s Yeah. And then I’ll show you where the position includes the content. And so I’ll show you where you can kind of add that content as well. So now that we have this set up, we in the spirit of time, I’m going to quickly go through this. So the same concept, we have SMS webbooks. Same thing as you as you saw with WhatsApp, you can create a RCS webhooks. And this once again, manages your you can create an inbound type of webhook, which will manage your opt in and opt out keywords, or a feedback type of webhook, which will manage your read receipts for RCS. And then you have your payload editor where you can add the custom payload as well here. Okay, so and then we of course, create our channel configuration, like in the last step. Now, this is the part that I want to share with you. If you go into your trip confirmation here, once again, I’m going to reference that SMS configuration channel configuration I created, I’m going to click Edit content.

And now you can see here, it’s a little bit of a different experience. So I’m actually copying and pasting this in a little bit of a different format, because I’m bringing it from provider through a JSON format. So if I click that, I can edit that here. In the editor, I can add once again, now the editor is working, but I can so I can add any type of variables here. This is what you would have seen in WhatsApp. For some reason, that wasn’t working previously. But once I click that I can now edit that as well and add any type of personalization to my message.

And this is this. If you if you stay there, maybe just for a minute, Travis, at this step, if you click on personalization icon, yep, this is the place the question that Sandra also asked, like you configured the configuration once, but the variables like post back text URL title, can be any number depending upon your messages or campaigns. So you can use the same configuration of card type, but can provide different messages based on your actual campaign and we will substitute so it’s basically one to it, you configure your credentials once and then can use depending upon your data and content. It’s just basically the format that defines template defines the format, but then the content I, I can reuse the template multiple times in multiple campaigns.

And last thing I’ll highlight, you can see here, this is the integration we have for our first phase. Our next phase that we’ll be releasing will allow for native authoring. And so just a quick sneak peek to end with something fun. I’m just going to share a couple of quick question. Kushal has another question for us. He asks, AJA supports 5000 TPS RCS is based on API, does it support the same TPS? So let me start answering this. So AJA supports 5000 TPS on transactional messages in journeys or what we call unitary events. In case of RCS, if your RCS provider or your account is configured for let’s say, even higher or lower thresholds, the RCS support that we offer today via custom SMS, we will throttle based on your provider account. If there are, for example, if my RCS account is configured, even if I’m triggering journey at 5000, if my credential or account is configured and support only 500, then we kind of implement the back pressure and we support it, we auto throttle to support based on your throttling needs. But yeah, you can if it supports 10,000, then you can configure and we’ll go. So it’s a scalable solution that we provide based on the API needs of the account with who we are dealing with. And quick question for those of you who don’t know what TPS is, TPS is text per second? Yes, throughput transactions per second. transactions per second, sorry. Yeah.

Okay, so the last teaser, Sandra, once again, we talked about the roadmap. In the future, you’re going to see a native RCS channel that allow you to directly create all these different types of content types. So media cards, carousels locations, what’s going to may look a little bit different from this is this is in development as we speak, this gives you a little bit of a preview of the type of experience you would have right inside of AGO. So instead of bringing the payload over, which we have today, if you want to use another provider, if you want to go RCS directly with 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ, we provide this fantastic native experience where you can create these natively. Okay, we have we’re almost at the top of the hour, but we have two more questions. One is from I hope I’m pronouncing this correctly. Montes Holmes, is there any additional configuration needed to forward CJA for reporting what KPIs currently exist for reporting while we’re natively integrated, right? So we are natively integrated. You can like whether it is with respect to WhatsApp and this RCS both the delivery report send delivered bounce errors all are there, read receipts or even emojis all are will be coming up in your profile level. So there is a native out of box report for WhatsApp similar to other channels. And the data can all be going to CJA for you where you can even build your own custom workspaces and dashboards. Let me also let’s take Kushil’s question as well, Sandra. Yes, so Kushil is asking do I need to set up throttle for RCS API or 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ will take care of it? So if there are scenarios where your endpoint let’s say provider supports very low 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ will take care in case of higher also like in journey we do support 500 from 500 to 5000. There is also a throttling coming I think it’s coming up or already might be out in campaign where we support rate limiting from one to so 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ will take care you can use this in case there are some custom need information needed like then we can we can discuss with you. Perfect. We’re at the top of the hour. We’ve covered a lot. We can spend at least another half hour to an hour on this topic I know. For the audience if you have any additional questions firstly this video will be or this the recording of the session will be available on experience league you’ll get the link to that plus you can ask your questions on the recording on the page we have a question section so feel free to ask your questions we’ll answer them we also have the ask me anything session coming up on October 15th so if you had some time to play around with with RCS with whatsapp or have any burning questions our experts will be there to answer them for you and yes thank you for joining us and Travis Nikhil oh we have one more we have one more we’ll do this very very quickly David is asking regarding the channel report in AJO are these the same metrics that meta provides or do they work differently so they are the same metrics that meta provides but if there are there are some more like are if there are any other kpis that you are looking forward to we are expanding like emojis double clicks blue ticks everything is coming back in AJO we started with delivery reports and consent specific kpis but and those kpis are also we are pulling back from meta once you configured your web hook in meta and that’s how it’s everything is coming back from meta account and we will be available to see that in your cga dashboards yeah we have five to six we’re starting with today and you’ll see we’ll have more and more that’ll come in natively out of the box but yeah it’s it’s coming from the same data that you would expect to find in your on your meta portal perfect thank you so much Travis Nikhil it was a pleasure having you on the show thank you for all the information you’ve given us I’m very excited about these two channels and I’m looking forward to hearing more and thank you so much to our audience for all the questions again if you have any more questions join the ask me anything session it’s on the community it’s a community chat a live chat or ask questions on the experience league page once we have the video published which will be within the next 24 hours thanks so much and see you soon bye everyone bye thank you thank you