Attended Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Five product capabilities to look for in an enterprise-grade solution

We are pleased to share this post from guest blogger Amardeep Modi, Everest Group.

Demand is growing for attended RPA robots that act like on-demand virtual digital assistants activated by humans to help with manual tasks, improving productivity, collaboration, and customer experience. In this blog, we’ll break down the must-have capabilities in an enterprise-grade attended RPA solution, the top adoption challenges, and the key best practices.

What should you look for in an enterprise-grade attended Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution?

With the need for digital transformation significantly growing following the pandemic, automation has emerged as a key enabler. While generating cost savings and driving operational efficiencies have traditionally been the major drivers for RPA adoption, enterprises have shifted their priorities in the last 12 to 18 months and are looking beyond just cost savings. Improving employee productivity and efficiency has become relatively more important. Enterprises also are putting greater emphasis on achieving more strategic business outcomes such as enhancing employee experience and improving customer satisfaction. In addition, the precipitating talent shortage is driving enterprises to focus on improving employee engagement and experience.

Consequently, demand is rising for attended RPA, a platform that democratizes the use of automation and empowers employees with their own personal digital assistants or robots on-demand, enabling them to automate mundane, repetitive tasks and allowing them to focus on more value-adding work. Attended RPA can help improve employee productivity and experience, leading to increased capacity and retention. This reduces the hiring requirements and enables enterprises to better manage the worsening talent supply-demand gap.

What is attended RPA and why does it matter?

Attended RPA enables seamless, time-critical human-robot collaboration and comes with advanced governance mechanisms for central control and monitoring. It is a step up from desktop automation, which focuses primarily on improving individual worker productivity by automating simple rules-based tasks on a user desktop. Attended RPA robots can run on virtual machines as well as physical desktops and operate as personal digital assistants to employees, providing them with near real-time guidance and contextual assistance to execute a business process.

Attended RPA is being used across various areas, such as on-the-job training, providing employees near real-time process guidance, and offloading manual tasks from customer service agents.

What should you expect from an enterprise-grade attended RPA solution?

As enterprises seek to drive greater value from attended RPA, they are faced with varying perspectives on what an enterprise-grade solution should include. To learn about what matters most to enterprises in an attended RPA solution, see the findings from Everest Group’s recent survey of 47 enterprise executives and RPA practitioners.

Based on the results, data security and governance emerged as the most important product capability, followed by ease of deployment and scalability and ease of automation development. Interestingly, mature adopters of attended RPA put greater importance on the agent assistance and guidance capabilities as they offer significant potential to drive superior employee experience and engagement.

Here’s a list of the five key product capabilities and underlying features that attended RPA must include to be considered a truly enterprise-grade solution:

 Source: Everest Group (2022)

Data security and governance – Robust security and governance is a must-have for attended RPA as it often involves moving sensitive data including customers’ confidential Personal Identifiable Information (PII) across systems. Irrespective of enterprises’ adoption maturity level, security and governance features such as robust logging of robot activity and audit trails, adherence to IT policy and security standards such as ISO, and session and error logs for debugging are critical to avoid data breaches, identify operational errors, and subvert fraudulent activities

• Ease of automation development – More than 65% of best-in-class enterprises leverage the citizen-led model as part of their automation strategy, and with increasing enterprise focus on democratizing RPA, demand for no- and low-code development features is rising. This holds well for attended RPA too. Some of the indispensable product features in this regard include the ability to develop attended and unattended automations through a single platform, the availability of pre-built connectors and integrations with enterprise applications, and extensive libraries of pre-built reusable automation assets. Mature enterprises looking to develop complex automation workflows are more interested in advanced collaboration features and the ability to track application instances and connect to the correct one in multi-instance scenarios
• Ease of deployment and scalability – Deployment features constitute key defining aspects of attended RPA. The ability to execute automation in the background and on minimized screens without interrupting or requiring the user to keep their hands in the air when the automation is running is a key ask from an enterprise-grade solution. Availability of a server component to centrally manage attended robots across multiple desktops and parallel processing that involves running multiple concurrent automations and guidance flows on the same machine are integral features for attended RPA. The ability of an attended robot to exchange information with other attended and unattended robots in near real-time is crucial for mature adopters to automate more complex use cases
• Agent assistance and guidance features – Mature attended RPA adopters who put a greater emphasis on employee experience view agent-assistance features as having greater importance. Features such as a unified screen, the ability to create a customizable interactive UI, and contextual triggering of RPA robots for agent assistance enabling human agents to seek on-demand assistance are essential asks from an attended RPA solution to deliver on its promise of enhanced employee engagement
• Integration with complementary capabilities – While RPA is extremely useful for automating repetitive tasks, oftentimes RPA needs to be combined with other complementary technologies to automate end-to-end processes to drive superior outcomes. Integrations with these technologies, such as process orchestrator, Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI), and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), can yield a variety of benefits and are becoming essential to augment attended RPA and enhance the overall value of the deployed automations

What other provider capabilities constitute enterprise considerations?

Attended RPA is more than just technology. Beyond the core product offering, some key provider capabilities that are critical to making a solution enterprise-grade include good product support and maintenance services, a strong ecosystem of technology and implementation partners, easy access to robust product training, and domain expertise to offer customized solutions.

Source: Everest Group (2022)

How can you get the most out of your attended RPA deployments?

The survey by Everest Group survey also revealed some of the key challenges that enterprises face in adopting and scaling attended RPA. The top three challenges indicated by enterprises include constituting and implementing a Center of Excellence (CoE)/operating model, training and accessing resources to develop and use attended automation, and a lack of awareness about the potential value of attended RPA. Enterprises that haven’t yet adopted attended RPA also disclosed that removing roadblocks and obtaining buy-in from compliance and security functions are significant barriers. Other challenges that enterprises face include implementing the right change strategy and approach, creating a robust strategy and roadmap, and maintaining a healthy pipeline of automation opportunities.

To overcome these challenges and realize greater value from investments in attended RPA, enterprises should focus on adopting some key best practices, which include the following:

• Securing executive sponsorship and empowering the CoE
• Appointing champions to drive awareness
• Driving citizen developer-focused training programs
• Enabling a crowd-sourcing approach for use case identification
• Partnering with enterprise IT early on

When done right, attended automation can yield phenomenal returns by decreasing onboarding time, reducing errors, improving first-call resolution, and drastically reducing average handling time. Of course, all of this adds up to greatly improved customer and employee experiences.

To ensure superior outcomes from attended RPA adoption, it is imperative to select a solution with enterprise-grade capabilities and evaluate other provider capabilities that are crucial for a successful implementation. Also, be cognizant of the challenges that might hinder organization-wide adoption and learn from the best practices of mature adopters to address these issues and achieve success.