RPA software vendors: squelch the rhetoric and get down to helping your clients learn and scale!

As part of the data input into our recently released RPA Software Top 10 2020, we conducted a customer experience (CX) survey with 255 RPA superusers hailing from enterprise and partner organizations. These superusers provided 311 ratings for 17 RPA products across 30+ product dimensions, as depicted in Exhibit 1. While this data provided loads of detailed insight into the strengths and weaknesses of each vendor, the overarching study results should serve as a wakeup call to the marketplace. The average CX score across all six assessment dimensions is a normalized equivalent of a 72 out of 100. This is an incredibly anemic performance from a promising software category. In this POV, we’ll unpack the results of the survey and make recommendations to RPA software vendors on how to move past meaningless rhetoric and provide sustainable value to their consumers.

Exhibit 1: RPA customer experience assessment dimensions

Source: HFS Research 2020

Robotic Transformation Software Customer Experience (CX) Survey

The RPA superusers have spoken, and they’re underwhelmed

RPA software has covered a lot of ground in the seven years since Blue Prism and HFS invented the moniker. For many clients who have been on RPA-fueled automation journeys, the last two years have yielded a notable increase in the fluency of business leaders about what RPA can and cannot do. Hype and market noise aside, enterprises directly or with the assistance of service partners have done a ton of RPA due diligence in the form of pilots, proofs of concept, and implementations. This knowledge and experience lend themselves to a tepid but growing satisfaction with RPA’s baseline product capabilities. Exhibit 2 shows that RPA customers and partners are most satisfied with product-centric dimensions such as features and functionality; security, governance, and controls; and scalability and flexibility. RPA is good at automating deterministic tasks governed by structured data.

In contrast to the tepid satisfaction with RPA’s baseline product capabilities, customer experience breaks down for the assessment dimensions that require people and process change—implementation, service, and support, and the holy grail of success, the ability to transform business processes and deliver business outcomes. Implementation, service, and support elements received the lowest CX ratings of the study, and this is an improvement over the 2018 results.

CX scores related to transforming business processes and delivering business outcomes had the smallest rating gap. Superusers are not wildly successful or horribly deficient with their RPA results. This is the ultimate picture of incremental results rather than the hyped exponential outcomes. HFS believes that successfully implementing and scaling high-impact automation programs is essentially impossible to achieve if you don’t grapple with the scourge of process debt that has built up over the years. HFS defines process debt as the creation of awkward and often manual processes that are designed to compensate for difficulties integrating with aging technologies. Process debt must be beaten down for automation to do anything more than deliver minor, incremental success.

The assessment dimension with the widest rating gap was for innovation and embedded intelligence. For RPA tools that natively embed cognitive capabilities that help enterprises grapple with unstructured data, clients are dazzled and delighted with the functionality, bestowing the highest ratings of the study. For those tools that lack these capabilities or a clear strategy to enable them, our superusers showed their dissatisfaction by rating them with the lowest scores of the study. As HFS has been saying for years, the power of “and,” enabled by our Triple-A Trifecta model (automation + AI + analytics) is the gateway to move from task automation to end-to-end automation.

Exhibit 2: Baseline RPA is great at automating deterministic tasks governed by structured data, but clients want more

Source: HFS Research 2020

Robotic Transformation Software Customer Experience (CX) Survey

Customers are tired of RPA hype

At the risk of incorrectly lambasting the well-oiled sales and marketing machines of RPA software companies, we asked our superusers their opinions about the levels of investment their RPA software providers are making in various areas. As depicted in Exhibit 3, the good news is that respondents believe their vendors are making the right level of investment in product development and their ecosystem of partners. The bad news is that customers and partners feel their training and customer service needs are being under-invested in. And the area garnering too much investment is…. sales and marketing. So yeah, RPA hype is real. RPA customers and partners would love to see more investment in helping them scale and drive success rather than selling them more.

Exhibit 3: RPA software providers—too much investment in sales and marketing, not enough in training and customer service

Is your RPA software provider making the right investments in the following areas?

Source: HFS Research 2020

Robotic Transformation Software Customer Experience (CX) Survey

The Bottom Line: RPA software vendors need to kill the hype and focus on customer scale.

To paraphrase Shakira, “Data don’t lie.” Our latest RPA CX study shows anemic results for a promising software category. While participants made gains in satisfaction with baseline RPA product functionality, customers and partners want clearer roadmaps, embedded or easy out-of-the-box integration with cognitive capabilities, and dashboards and analytics that help them track and prove ROI, and they need massive help eradicating process debt. RPA software vendors can address some of this through enhanced product functionality that supports analytics and visualization of results and improved capabilities with unstructured data. Process debt is a much bigger issue, but software companies can facilitate healthy approaches to this through advocating for process evaluation best practices and an increased focus on process discovery and mining to help enterprises better assess and refine their as-is processes and pick the best candidates for automation. If every RPA software vendor focused exclusively on scaling the customers they have right now and did not gain an additional new logo, they would be successful by all measures.