Change Management and Empathy are Keys to RPA CX

Deriving excellent customer experience (CX) from their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) investment has to be the holy grail for many organizations investing in the space. It’s increasingly essential, too; as early adopters and pilot projects move into their scaling phase, there’s simply no room for complacency by suppliers. Unfortunately, too much emphasis has been placed on RPA features and functions rather than on an end-to-end view of automation that involves the voice of the customer in the context of their own operations.

At HfS, we have reached out to RPA customers to understand which factors they consider essential for excellent RPA CX and how customers view their own experiences with RPA—providing rich insight for the future.

The Big Picture View of Robotic Process Automation Customer Experiences

We have now launched the first in our ground-breaking series of reports on Robotic Process Automation customer experiences, based around real Voice of the Customer insights from 75+ RPA end user client interviews: The HfS Robotic Process Automation Customer Experiences: Big Picture View.

For the first time, we have an unvarnished perspective on how RPA customers see the performance of their RPA providers. We have benchmarked the overall market across six dimensions of customer experience, spanning 12 leading RPA players including Automation Anywhere, Antworks, Blue Prism, Jidoka, Kofax, Kryon, NICE, Pega, Redwood, Softomotive, Thoughtonomy, and UiPath.

We will follow this introductory report into RPA CX by deep dive analyses into the Big Three RPAs—Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and Blue Prism—then with a comparative analysis benchmarking all 12 RPA participants.

Some of the key takeaways from this study are in Exhibit 1 and summarized below.

Exhibit 1: Key Study Takeaways

Source: HfS Research, 2018

• RPA customer experience has been good across the board. Despite preconceptions of middling satisfaction ratings, we have found that RPA customer experience has been good overall. On a relative basis, RPA CX scores are highest for security, governance, and control and lowest for embedded intelligence, underlining perceptions among customers that RPA vendors have done a good job when it comes to some of the core requirements for securing and governing robotic processes.
• RDA CX is better than RPA CX. There is a noticeable improvement in customer experience for clients deploying robotic desktop automation (RDA) technologies for relatively simpler use-cases than for clients with more complex back-office process automation (RPA) needs. Customers tend to find that RDA is easier to implement and requires less coding, which helps RDA to drive more rapid time to value and a higher rating for delivering business outcomes.
• RPA CX tends to improve with the scale of bots deployed. The vast majority of RPA customers are in scaling mode. On average, there is a 94% YoY increase in bots expected from the sample of customers we interviewed—some clients expect far higher investments than others. Not a single client expected to reduce their investment. This further reinforces our strong growth forecasts for RPA adoption over the coming few years.
• Most RPA implementations miss out on added benefits from Artificial Intelligence. RPA providers do least well turning their attention to the next stage of RPA, embedding intelligence via techniques like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, to turn data into actionable intelligence. They therefore have work to do to convince their customers that they are the right platform on which to build broader Intelligent Automation services to the enterprise.
• Most customer challenges focused around broader business process change, rather than technology. We asked customers to describe their biggest challenges. Time and again, the same words—process, change, organization, and environment—came up as key issues. Customers find that RPA alone isn’t a silver bullet. Processes and environments tend to be far more complex, and often overlooked is planning for both addressing the impact on people and operations and managing the changing work environment. RPA CX is therefore dependent on a far broader set of both hard and soft factors.

This final point underlines our premise for the RPA CX research and validates our own thinking following the many conversations with the customers and suppliers.

Bottom Line—RPA CX Isn’t Solely Down to the Simple Choice of Product

RPA CX isn’t solely down to the simple choice of product, but to a much richer, complex set of needs. It’s a huge adjustment for customers to move from a manual process to one wholly run, or even partly run, by robots. They introduce technicalities, training requirements, and, let’s be frank—fear—in the minds of many operations staff. RPA tools can only go so far by delivering against some of the hard metrics put forward in business cases.

This presents significant opportunities for providers that can also embed softer human-centred relationship skills like mediation, retraining, change management, and healthy doses of empathy, to support organizations on their end-to-end automation journey. As the technical side of RPA develops apace, we believe the human aspects will become a critical differentiator in delivering true RPA CX over the next period. Our RPA research is going to explore this theme increasingly during 2018.