Agents

To display the correct instructions, click the button for your RBM model.

Legacy RBM model Partner-based RBM model

To determine which model you're using, open the Business Communications Developer Console. If Partner account settings displays on the homepage, then you're using the partner-based RBM model. If you don't have access to Partner account settings, you're using the legacy RBM model.

Agent A programmatic entity that sends messages to users on behalf of a brand. The agent includes any interface that users interact with and any code or infrastructure required to power the interaction. Agents can provide a simple one-way experience, like sending a notification, or they can be conversational and react to users' responses in a back-and-forth exchange.

Messages between a user and an agent appear in an RCS-enabled messaging app, such as the Messages app, on the user's device. The Messages app displays branding and profile information for your agent, including name, logo, description, contact information, and URLs.

You could create an agent for Growing Tree Bank that allows users to interact with various aspects of the bank, such as the Customer Care and Mortgage department. Alternatively, you could create an agent for each department, for example, Growing Tree Bank Customer Care and Growing Tree Bank Mortgages. Before creating multiple agents for one business, consider the user experience and refer to the conversational best practices.

Create an agent

RBM agents use the RCS Business Messaging API to send messages, events, and other requests to users. When you create an agent, you enable access to the RBM API and define your agent's colors and branding information.

Prerequisites

Before you create an agent, identify the following:

• Name of the brand your agent will represent
• Information about your agent:
  • Name
  • Region
  • Billing category
  • Use case

Identify the agent's region

The RBM API supports three regional endpoints to help businesses comply with regional and business requirements. Likewise, RBM agents can exist in one of three regions:

• North America
• Europe
• Asia Pacific

When you create your agent, choose your agent's region based on applicable regulations, requirements, and proximity to end users. Region determines where your agent operates from and where it stores its data.

If you or your intended users don't fit within those regions, choose the region that is closest to you to minimize latency. For example, if you're in Latin America, choose the North America region, or if you're in Africa, choose the Europe region.

All regions have equal access to carriers worldwide. Don't decide your agent's region based on your target carriers.

Note: You can't change your agent's region after you create your agent.

Determine the agent's billing category

Carriers that approve RBM content on their networks also bill for delivering RBM messages to their subscribers using this billing framework:

• Conversational - A charge for a conversation that consists of multiple A2P and P2A messages within a given time period.
• Single Message - A charge for a single message containing rich RBM content (such as a message containing a Rich Card or Carousel).
• Basic Message - A charge for a plain text message of up to 160 UTF-8 characters.

When you create your agent, choose the billing category that most closely matches the behavior of your agent:

• Conversational - This agent engages in complex user interactions where messages are exchanged in both directions.

Note: The following two categories never create conversational billing events - carriers will charge a Basic Message or Single Message price for each message, depending on the content that is delivered.

• Single Message - This agent generally sends rich messages and seldom expects to receive replies.

• Basic Message - This agent implements SMS upgrade to RBM and seldom expects to receive replies. Generally the agent is expected to send plain text messages of up to 160 UTF-8 characters. But the agent is not restricted; it can send richer content if programmed to do so, and will be billed accordingly.

Note: You can change your agent's billing category before you launch your agent. Contact us to discuss changing to a different billing category post-launch.

Identify the agent's use case

Each RBM agent is required to have a predefined use case that reflects the nature of the conversations it is intended to have with end users and to help businesses comply with business rules. RBM supports four use cases:

• OTP: One-time passwords required to securely authenticate an account or confirm a transaction
• Transactional: Notifications, updates or alerts to share information directly relevant to a customer's existing services or products, such as alerts for suspicious account activities, purchase confirmations, and shipping notifications.
• Promotional: Sales, marketing and promotional messages to new or existing customers, with the objective to increase awareness, engagement and sales.
• Multi-use: Conversational flows that combine transactional and promotional use cases, such as sending an account notification and then offering a discount or upgrade for a new product and service.

See Choose the right use case for a more thorough description of when to use each use case.

Note: You cannot change the use case after your agent has been submitted for launch. Be sure to review use cases and business rules for your country prior to submitting your agent.

Create the agent

1. Open the Business Communications Developer Console, sign in with your RBM partner Google Account, and click your agent.
2. Click Create agent.
3. Enter your agent's name and select your agent's region, billing category, and use case. Then click Create agent.
4. When your agent is available, click your agent's name.

Next steps

Note: You need a service account key to securely authenticate API calls. If you haven't already created a service account key for your partner account, now is the time to do it.

Now that you have a working agent, you can edit agent information and configure an agent-level webhook if needed.

Edit agent information

After you create your agent, you can edit the agent's information on the Agent information page:

• Display name
• Description
• Color (with a minimum 4.5:1 contrast ratio to white, for example, #FF0000)
• A hero image (1440x448 px JPEG file, no larger than 200 KB)

• A logo (224x224 px, no larger than 50 KB) In conversations, logos display as 224 px diameter circles. Make sure that your logo displays well as a circle.

  Test your logo

  Enter a URL for your logo to see how it would look to users.

  Note: The web server hosting the image must allow images to be embedded on other websites.

• Phone number

• Website

• Email address

• Privacy Policy URL

• Terms of Service URL

The Overview and Agent information pages preview how your agent appears in the Messages app.

Check the contrast ratio

Contrast ratio is a comparison of the contrast and ease of distinction between two colors. A high contrast ratio between two colors, such as between a background and text, increases readability in bad lighting and for people with accessibility considerations. WCAG 2.0 defines 4.5:1 as a minimum contrast ratio for text.

You can verify that the agent color you identified has at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio to white using online tools like the WebAIM Contrast Checker.

Next steps

Now that you've specified the agent information, you can invite test devices, send messages, make other calls from the API reference, or use a sample agent.