March 18, 2026
RCS Adoption in Regulated Industries Gets a Boost: Televox and Twilio Expand Two-Way Messaging Capabilities
If you have ever received a text from your doctor’s office confirming an appointment, or an automated call from a hospital asking you to reschedule, there is a reasonable chance the technology behind it was built by Televox. The digital patient engagement company, which operates under WestCX within West Technology Group, has spent more than 30 years building communication infrastructure specifically for healthcare and other regulated industries, the kind where a missed message can mean a missed diagnosis, an unpaid bill, or a no-show that costs a clinic revenue.
In a recent move, Televox is expanding that infrastructure into a newer messaging format, Rich Communication Services (RCS), powered by Twilio, giving regulated organisations a channel that goes considerably further than a standard SMS alert.
From Notifications to Conversations
If a message does not catch someone’s attention in the first two seconds, it is gone. Patients and customers are not waiting to call back, log into a portal, or hunt for a link, and a static SMS gives them no reason to stop scrolling. The logic behind the RCS expansion is that a message worth sending should also be a message worth responding to, on the spot, without friction.
Sam Meckey, president of WestCX, said: “Customer expectations have changed: people want real conversations, not fragmented notifications. RCS allows us to bring secure, interactive messaging into the centre of the customer journey, especially for regulated industries where trust and compliance are non-negotiable.”
The expansion builds on Televox’s RCS launch in September 2025 and sits within a WestCX strategy to unify voice, messaging, and digital channels into a single engagement platform. WestCX also operates Mosaicx, its AI-powered conversational automation brand, which handles virtual agents and contact centre infrastructure.
What RCS Delivers
Unlike SMS, RCS supports verified sender identities, brand logos, rich media, interactive buttons, real-time analytics, and automatic fallback to SMS when a recipient’s device does not support the format. The last feature carries significant weight in healthcare, where message delivery reliability is not optional.
For example, after a phone or online appointment booking, an organisation can follow up with branded RCS messages carrying parking instructions, pre-visit reminders, or next steps, within the same thread. Prescription refill prompts, billing actions, and rescheduling options can be handled without the patient needing to leave the conversation. Early deployments are projected to deliver 50–80% higher conversion rates and three times the response rates of SMS or email, though the company notes these are forward-looking estimates.
RCS is earning attention across sectors for its capacity to turn one-off notifications into persistent, interactive conversations, which is particularly relevant during high-stakes moments like appointment scheduling or billing.
The Trust Problem
In regulated industries, an unverified message from a hospital or pharmacy tends to be actively distrusted.
Alejandro Borgia, VP of Product Communications at Twilio, pointed to findings from Twilio’s own research: 75% of consumers who receive a branded text say it increases their trust in that communication. “With consumer trust waning, branded communications are imperative to building a relationship with customers, especially in highly regulated industries like healthcare,” he added.
Verified sender identities, where a brand’s logo and name are displayed alongside the message, are central to what WestCX is offering through this deployment. The same infrastructure that makes RCS interactive also makes it identifiable, which reduces the confusion that drives opt-outs and ignored messages in sectors where communication is already difficult.
Organisations operating under strict data protection requirements, like HIPAA in the United States and GDPR in Europe, every new communications channel introduces compliance questions. RCS messages are encrypted in transit, and the built-in SMS fallback ensures delivery does not depend on a recipient’s device being RCS-capable.
