4 Best Ways to Educate your Customers about RPA & Intelligent Automation

Nearly any task or process is impacted by RPA & intelligent automation in one way or another across industries today. By leveraging intelligent automation, zero manual intervention of entire processes, routine and workflows - data collection, analysis, understanding context & finally making decisions- can be achieved.

Until recent times, robotics had more applications in the primary sector- automating & eliminating the human involvement from the production value chain. Now, tertiary sector esp. the financial services industry (also High Tech/Telecom, see below image) has majorly started applying use-case driven RPAs & Intelligent Automation to automate and eliminate low (/no) value-adding activities performed by humans. There is a complete article on the state of Machine Learning & AI, 2017 by McKinsey. You can read it here

Apart from the industries mentioned above, the adoption of RPA & intelligent automation is still in nascent stages in many other industries. The chief reason as per my opinion is that there is a lot of variation in the way RPA & intelligent automation is positioned or marketed. Vendors & Start-ups do not talk much about the risk, compliance, governance, metering etc. of intelligent automation. Therefore, the overall eco-system of how/what/by when/disaster recovery of using RPAs or intelligent automation is not visualized coherently by the CXOs & the decision-makers, leading to low adoption rate of these new technologies.

In my opinion, the four best ways in which start-ups & vendors can build Trust & Authenticity are:

1. Analyst Speak:

There are many independent third party analyst in the IT industry who benchmark the various products in the field of RPA & Intelligent Automation. These analysts compare & categorize the various service providers based upon certain parameters and dimensions, and then, normalize the result to create a framework where potential clients can compare one provider with another.

On a side note, if you are a CXO who is exploring the adoption of RPA & intelligent automation in your enterprise, the best way to proceed is to seek advice from this community and get your uncertainties answered, possibilities of risk mitigation & feasible intelligent automation solution finalized for deployment.

So if you are looking to educate your customers & the market, educate the analyst community first.

2. Seminars, Symposium, Events

This point is for the service-providers. Attend all the major events, get a booth and prepare yourself to show the best version of your product to the people walking in. Try to capture their response, reaction and feedback. This, in my opinion, is one of the best strategies for lead generation for product.

3. Get your hands dirty: Perform Pilots & Proof of Concepts

Simple business rule is- New Customer Acquisition is tougher (both monetary & effort wise) than Existing Customer Retention. Therefore, you can focus upon adding the flavor of RPA & intelligent automation into their already existing managed services account.

Then, to get the initial buy-in from customers, communication & formulation of problem statement & relevant solution is very necessary. The easiest way to start is by doing a proof of concept or pilot for a problem statement, which is simple and can be easily scaled, but at the same time, is a major bottleneck to customers. In addition, what needs to be mutually agreed upon is the success criteria for that proposal (pilot or POC).

The advantage of such proposal is that you will be using the success criteria of that proposal to make the customers comfortable.

Once the POC or pilot exercise becomes successful, deploy the RPA or intelligent automation solution to the complete enterprise.

4. Get Customer Testimonial

Word of mouth has always been and shall be the best way to create Trust & Authenticity in a B2B environment. So, the more you can get your customers to share a dais with you, release a video etc. the better stand you have in the market to gain new customers.

Sweating today to get visibility & becoming an industry leader should be the approach to educate the market and customers. A positive market wave favoring your solutions can give you a first mover’s advantage in this field.