The dream of many marketers is to free their employees from mundane, repetitive, low-skilled tasks. Because despite vendor promises of seamless integration and data flow, manual data processing is an inevitable result of implementing new digital processes and tools.
These results are not limited to marketing, however, with similar stories being told across finance, IT, HR and other prominent business functions.
It was the pain of professionals in those functions that led to the emergence of a set of tools known as robotic process automation, or RPA (not to be confused with the Prince-related reality TV series Alfred Hospital).
Forrester principal analyst Leslie Joseph describes RPA at its most basic level as the ability to use software robots to understand user interface elements on websites and applications and string them together into workflows that effectively mimic what a human operator would do. As a result, RPA bots are often referred to as digital workers.
But while RPA-based digital workers may now be commonplace in finance and IT workflows, Joseph says their use in marketing has been limited to date, largely because most modern marketing platforms include robust API-based integration capabilities that minimize the need for RPA-based processes. However, a number of recent announcements point to an increase in RPA use in marketing.
RPA and Marketing Use Cases
In August, Salesforce announced it had acquired German RPA company Servicetrace to integrate with its existing API-based integration capabilities it acquired when it bought MuleSoft in 2018. That same month, another vendor, MoEngage, raised $32.5 million to help develop RPA technology to optimize customer engagement.
These events are just the latest in a string of M&A deals for RPA vendors, including multiple acquisitions by Microsoft, SAP, IBM, and ServiceNow, as well as the public listing of RPA specialist UiPath, which is now valued at over $35 billion.
With so much money on the line, it was only a matter of time before marketers started to see RPA vendors as a concern, especially those related to data flow in customer engagement.
Blue Prism itself employs digital staff for community management tasks.
Joseph also sees powerful applications of RPA in customer management by combining data together from systems that are not easily integrated.
The third possibility for the advent of RPA exists in lead automation.
Finally, another marketing task that is well suited to RPA is providing information to chatbots. “A chat bot on a website is usually there to provide you with information,” says Joseph.
The Evolution of RPA
RPA technology is rapidly evolving, thanks in part to advances in machine learning that are expanding the complexity of tasks that digital workers can perform. For example, UiPath and Alteryx have teamed up to create a no-code data manipulation tool that can take complex data from disparate systems and apply ML techniques before passing it down to an RPA bot. This has led to the emergence of a concept called intelligent automation, Joseph says.
RPA also comes with a number of different marketplaces that can be used to pull systems and data together. In addition to native integration capabilities within martech tools, service provider ServiceNow offers a cloud-based platform that allows users to replace unstructured work patterns with intelligent, automated workflows. There are also a number of integration platform-as-a-service (IPaaS) providers, including Boomi and Jitterbit, that offer an alternative way to create and manage digital workflows.
But while the opportunities for RPA in marketing are huge, Joseph says marketers often have more than enough opportunities to use the tools they already have. At the same time, most RPA vendors haven’t pushed too hard to engage with CMOs because there are already such significant opportunities in serving other business functions.
However, the success of RPA also means that many easy opportunities in finance, IT and other fields have been satisfied.
While RPA tools ultimately lead to the creation of digital workers, there is still a significant skill set required to create and integrate them, and Joseph suggests this could create another barrier to RPA adoption in marketing in the short term.
Original post: https://www.cmo.com.au/article/691555/what-marketers-need-know-about-robotic-process-automation/
Translated by: Phan Cong Duy
