The Frictionless Feed Stack: Five Ways the Relay Feed Gets More Customers from Message to Completed Action

Your organization knows which customers need to act — who needs to complete their enrollment form, who hasn’t funded their account, who is up for a prescription refill. The question isn’t whether you’re reaching customers about these actions. The question is whether enough of them are completing these actions, the ones that your business depends on. Reach is quantifiable, but there is a gray area in the space between a notification and a completed action.

For regulated enterprises in healthcare, financial services, and life sciences, that space is where outcomes are won or lost. Every step a customer has to take between receiving a message and completing an action is a point where they can drop off. And in regulated industries, where the stakes of non-completion are high — a lapsed coverage, an unfilled prescription, an account that never funds — drop-off isn’t just a marketing metric. It’s a missed business result.

Relay is built on a straightforward premise: the channel design is the competitive advantage. That’s why the Relay Feed is engineered to remove friction at every stage of the customer journey — not as a feature set, but as an architectural commitment. Here’s what that looks like in practice: the Frictionless Feed Stack.

The Relay Feed reaches customers the way they’re already reachable: by SMS. When a customer receives a Relay message, they tap a link. That’s it. There’s no app to install or app store to navigate.

This matters more than it might seem. App download is one of the highest-friction steps in any digital engagement flow. And the app download is just the first step in the process. Unless push notifications are enabled, which is optional for customers, the onus is on the customer to go to the app for any update. Without notifications, an installed app is functionally silent, creating an additional barrier to success.

By delivering the Feed experience through an SMS-initiated link, Relay achieves something rare: every customer who can receive a text can access the Feed. No segment left out. No adoption curve to climb.

When a customer taps that link for the first time, they land directly in a personalized, secure Feed experience — no username, no password, no account creation. The channel is open from the first interaction.

This is not a security compromise. It’s a compliance-by-design decision. Relay is purpose-built for regulated industries, it’s HIPAA and SOC2 compliant, plus HITRUST CSF certified, which means the channel environment is engineered to carry PII and PHI safely without requiring customers to authenticate their way through a portal. The security is in the infrastructure, not on the customer’s shoulders.

For healthcare and financial services organizations accustomed to watching customers abandon digital experiences at the login screen, this is a structural shift. The first visit is frictionless by default.

Removing login friction for a first visit is meaningful. Removing it for every subsequent visit is what makes the channel perform over time.

For returning users — the customers who have already engaged and represent the highest-engagement and highest-value segment — traditional authentication is still a drop-off point. A password to remember. A verification step to complete. One more obstacle between an SMS notification and the action the business needs.

Passkeys change this. Using the same biometric authentication a customer already uses to unlock their phone — Face ID, Touch ID, or fingerprint — Relay authenticates returning users with a single tap. This is authentication that is simultaneously simpler for the customer and more secure than a password — a combination that doesn’t often come together.

For regulated healthcare and banking organizations, this matters on both dimensions: a seamless returning-user experience drives more completions, and device-bound biometric authentication meets the security standards compliance teams require.

Once a customer is in the Feed, the goal is to make it possible to complete whatever the business needs — within that same session, without redirecting to a separate portal, without requiring another login, without breaking the flow.

The Relay Feed is built for action completion, not just message delivery. Using Power Ups, Relay’s set of capture capabilities inside the Relay Feed, customers can complete forms, provide e-signatures, upload documents, confirm shipping addresses, and authorize refills, right within the Feed message. Plus, with elements like Prefill, which auto-populates existing customer data into the form for smoother submission, and Dynamic List, which generates personalized selection lists for each individual customer rather than a generic one-size-fits-all list, friction is reduced even more for customers as they look to complete the actions that drive the business outcomes our clients care about.

This is the difference between a channel that delivers a message and a channel that closes the loop. In industries where the completion of a specific action — not just the receipt of a communication — determines whether a program succeeds, that distinction is significant.

The Feed carries PII and PHI safely at the level of personalization needed to make each of these actions feel relevant and achievable. That’s the structural advantage of a channel built for regulated industries from the ground up, rather than adapted for them after the fact.

Even in a frictionless channel, timing matters. A customer who didn’t complete their enrollment form on day one doesn’t need the same experience as a customer who just opened the Feed for the first time. A patient approaching a refill window needs a different prompt than one who just filled.

Smart Actions is Relay’s logic and orchestration layer — the mechanism that makes outreach behavior-responsive rather than calendar-driven. When a customer takes an action (or doesn’t), Smart Actions triggers the appropriate next step automatically. No manual follow-up.

This matters for operations leaders watching their teams absorb routine outreach work that should be automated. It matters for programs that need to reach thousands of patients or members with personalized, timely follow-up that scales. And it matters for the customers on the receiving end, who experience a channel that feels responsive to them, not designed for the general population.

These five elements — no app download, no login, Passkey for returning users, in-Feed form completion using Power Ups, behavior-triggered follow-through with Smart Actions — are not independent features. They are a single design philosophy: reduce every barrier between the enterprise’s intent and the customer’s action.

Regulated enterprises already have the data to know who needs to act. They already have the programs designed to drive it. What Relay provides is the channel architecture that makes those programs perform — compliantly, at scale, with verified proof of every completion.

Frictionless isn’t a product feature. It’s a commitment to what a channel has to be if it’s going to close the gap between enterprise intent and verified customer completion.

If you would like to experience a Relay Feed for yourself, use the link below to Book a Demo with one of our sales representatives.