Summary
UiPath Automation Excellence Awards: Transforming automation specialists into industry thought leaders An integrated campaign to drive customer loyalty and increase automation adoption, by creating a unique platform to recognize innovative automation projects and the individuals behind these. The much-anticipated awards have gone on to become a brand property for UiPath with significant visibility across media and are now seen as an industry benchmark for automation excellence and digital transformation by the business community.
Challenge
The primary marketing opportunity was identified in 2019—when these awards were conceptualized—to increase our foothold and celebrate the people behind the robots. With automation being a fast-growing choice for digital transformation, UiPath as a brand didn't have the awareness and mindshare in the market and at various levels in customer organizations, which was a barrier to scaling and enterprise-wide adoption. Parallelly, there were some tremendous projects happening at a few levels in the enterprise which deserved to be recognized. Customer loyalty has been one of our top marketing and business priorities — ensuring renewals and growth year on year with our existing customer base. We realized the necessity to offer a unique platform to our customers each year where they could showcase their automation successes not only to other customers, but to the larger business community — bringing UiPath as partner of choice for any automation and/or digital transformation
Objective
Customers: • Identify and recognize those who have leveraged automation to transform business processes, give them the spotlight they deserve, and position them as thought leaders in the industry. • Winners become brand advocates for UiPath Automation Platform by offering them greater visibility on multiple platforms, thereby improving customer loyalty and retention Brand: • Make UiPath a preferred name for automation among customers and prospects, leveraging customer recognition to drive brand loyalty, deepen customer relationships, and increase customer satisfaction. • Focus on the Human behind the bots and recognize people for their tremendous work. • Position the UiPath brand as an enabler to truly ‘accelerate human achievement'. • Transform the awards into long-term coveted automation industry recognition Industry: • Elevate Automation as a significant C-level agenda, especially regarding thriving through disruption. • Lay the foundation for driving adoption and scale for automation across our customers and the business community.
Strategy
• Research: Detailed pre-research with customers & partners to identify motivations, pain points, and real value that UiPath could offer and hence solve their problems. • Ideation: Close ideation with internal stakeholders & our independent Management Consultants (Positiv Edge Consulting) to shortlist & structure award categories, overall process, criteria, etc. to ensure longevity. • Deliberation: Detailed discussions between UiPath customer-facing teams to structure evaluations of nominated projects—based on 3 impact levels identified—Project-level impact, Business-level impact, Strategic-level impact. • Website Creation: Development of a comprehensive, creative, customer-friendly website around the awards and a platform for customers to submit their nominations online – with a clear focus on putting the spotlight on customers and teams who have led the robots. The same website was to be later used to showcase customer testimonials, an executive summary of the winning projects, and a video address from the leader of the winner organization. • Setting up Partnership: We associated the program with an established media house (The Economic Times – India's leading Financial Daily) to further add to the credibility and brand value of the awards and to broaden PR and visibility. • Evaluation Procedure: Rigorous and independent evaluation and deliberation by an eminent, impartial jury panel consisting of experts from different industries and areas of expertise. Jurors belong to illustrious organizations like ITC, EY, ICICI, Sequoia Capital, and TCS. • Winner Announcement and Digital Amplification: While the 2019 awards were held offline in a grand ceremony, we moved virtual in 2020 and announced the winners at the Global Reboot work Festival. We also amplified the winners and their testimonials through ET Channels as well as the social handles of UiPath leaders. This year too, on December 8, we'll continue with a virtual media announcement across platforms to promote and amplify winning customers.
Data
Conceptualization and creation of customer awards started in early 2019, when we began interviewing and meeting customers and partners to better understand the RPA marketplace, customer automation journey—successes and challenges—to develop the right program framework. Right from the start, this program has been driven by data — be it data from customer feedback, or data from responses. • Surveyed ~30% of Install base at the time asking about their preferred mode of marketing engagements. • Conducted in-person meetings/interviews with and concluded on the need for a platform to showcase, recognize, reward automation projects – which in turn also furthered our internal objective of driving customer loyalty. • Launched in 2019, the awards witnessed an overwhelming response of 233 Registrations and 144 Nominations. The grand award ceremony held in December 2019 made a mark on many of our customers; 40% of participating customers have now become reference customers for UiPath, indicating improved customer loyalty. • The second edition held in 2020, saw increased response – 313 Registrations and 213 Nominations. This clearly indicates that the program had worked and struck the right chord in our customers' minds — setting the stage for us to increase adoption and drive loyalty within our customer organizations. • Incremental and overwhelming response was an absolute indication to continue the awards in 2021 as well with a 230+ nominations — and an even stronger resolve to make UiPath a preferred brand across all departments within all our customer organizations. Data is at the core of our shortlisting and evaluation process. Customers are encouraged to provide quantitative KPIs in the nomination form. These KPIs are run through an algorithm, which assigns a score or rank to each KPI. This data then becomes one of the primary metrics for creating our shortlist, and jury decision making.
Solution
Right from its inception in 2019, we set an aspirational tone for the UiPath Automation Excellence Awards. From the messaging to the imagery, the intent was to create a larger-than-life persona for these automation champions — putting a spotlight on their achievements and positioning these awards as an industry benchmark. Communication was crafted accordingly, with the intentional usage of words such as frontrunners, game changers, change makers, and so on. Coming to visuals, we resorted to the liberal and prominent use of a trophy (along with other relatable symbols of success) in most of the marketing assets and promotions — while still preserving the UiPath corporate brand look and feel throughout. We built a custom website with an intuitive interface and backend to encourage these automation heroes to submit their innovative entries. Website and nomination process were backed by an integrated email campaign, with targeted communication at every stage of the process. Winner video testimonials in 2019 and 2020 were amplified across social media and promotions in following years, gaining significant traction and giving the winners a platform to showcase their victory- truly celebrating the Humans Behind the bots- deepening their connect with the UiPath as a brand and building customer loyalty. Case studies and success stories were crafted from the winning entries, turning the winners into industry thought leaders in automation and empowering them with newfound visibility in important forums. These measures supported our core objective of building customer loyalty, and elevating UiPath as a preferred automation platform within these organizations, as well as in the industry. The impact and incremental value were clearly visible in the interest garnered and the steady increase in registrations and nominations over the years – from 233 registrations and 144 nominations in 2019 to 400+ registrations and 230+ nominations in 2021.
Results
2019 Awards: • 233 Registrations | 144 Projects Nominated | 250+ Attendees • 36 Customer and Partner Winners | 20+ Winner Interviews • 40% of customers became references and UiPath advocates. • USD 7M+ pipeline impacted in 2019, of which we've closed USD 4.5M • 1.5Mn+ views and engagement across social media channels • 100% of award-winning customers renewed licenses; 80% have seen a substantial increase in business. • 15% increase in UiPath India Marketing leads from 2019 attributed to the awards. • Marketing costs towards lead generation for the following year estimated to reduce by USD 180,000 or INR 1.26 crores. 2020 Awards: • 313 Registrations (50% higher than 2019) | 213 Projects Nominated • 37 Customer and Partner Winners | 20+ Winner Interviews • USD 10M+ pipeline impact in 2020 • Approximately 3Mn + views and engagement across digital and social media channels. • 100 digital publications covered the awards. Garnered 102.6 mn impressions totally. • 1500+ attendees at virtual events across the globe. • 40% customer-base participated (10% higher than 2019) • Advertorials in ET print (circulation of about 4.5 lac in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore) & ETCIO online avg. UVPM for the website 7.6cr. • Twitter SOV increased from 36% in September to 83% in December due to the positive buzz on Awards - 80% positive sentiment • 20 Lac impressions and 3,500 page views from winner promotion via et.com, ETCIO display ads 2021 Awards: • The awards have gone on to become an ongoing customer recognition and brand property for UiPath and are now in its third year. • Already received a lot of enthusiasm and interest from customers, with 400+ registrations and 230+ nominations. • Seen as a global best practice and is being adopted globally across UiPath geos.
