RCS Setup

RCS Agent setup sat at the intersection of external carrier constraints, global compliance rules, and Klaviyo's existing SMS ecosystem. The work needed to make a required infrastructure task feel consistent, trustworthy, and easy to complete inside an established product surface.

• Beta operations

  Early access relied on spreadsheets that created high cognitive effort for customers and manual coordination across product, operations, and customer-facing teams.

• Carrier requirements

  Required fields, validation rules, and review expectations varied by market, increasing the risk of incomplete or inconsistent data during carrier review.

• Platform strategy

  RCS needed to feel as approachable as SMS despite being more technical, more regulated, and less familiar to both customers and internal teams.

• No existing product pattern

  Klaviyo had no in-product precedent for RCS Agent configuration, so the workflow had to establish a durable mental model without feeling bolted on.

• External carrier constraints

  Carrier requirements varied by country and imposed strict validation rules that needed to be reflected directly in the UI.

• Unfamiliar domain language

  RCS terms like agent, sender, and verification were new to customers and internal teams, making in-context guidance essential.

• Settings architecture fit

  The experience needed to live naturally inside Settings as shared brand infrastructure, not as a campaign-level artifact.

1. 01

   Progressive disclosure

   Expose requirements in manageable steps instead of asking customers to parse the full complexity of RCS registration up front.

2. 02

   Contextual input guidance

   Make required fields, formatting rules, and country-specific constraints clear at the moment customers need them.

3. 03

   System-aware validation

   Tie error states to real carrier requirements so customers can resolve issues before submission instead of after review failure.

4. 04

   Configure once, reuse everywhere

   Position the Agent as persistent brand infrastructure that supports RCS messaging across the platform.

Before designing the setup flow, we aligned on why RCS mattered for brands: richer messages, verified identity, and a more trusted customer experience than traditional SMS.

The manual and third-party patterns we reviewed made the underlying system visible: long forms, carrier-specific categories, and little help understanding which details mattered.

The original spreadsheet-like requirement set contained nearly 30 inputs. Mapping those fields into groups by intent became the foundation for a guided workflow.

The designed experience converted the spreadsheet into a structured, multi-step wizard. Inputs were grouped by intent, with inline support for brand identity, contact details, compliance, and edge-case requirements.

The flow shipped as the productized setup path for RCS Agents inside Settings.

Beta process

Manual -> self-serve

Replaced spreadsheet-based coordination

Required inputs

~30 fields

Structured into a guided setup flow

Foundation

Reusable pattern

Established a model for future messaging setup

The launched experience reduced setup friction for early RCS adopters, improved data consistency for downstream carrier approval, and reduced the operational burden of managing registration outside the product. Most importantly, it allowed RCS to launch as a productized feature rather than an operational exception.