How Pipefy more than doubled user retention

Founded in 2015, Pipefy is a workflow management software that provides a no-code platform for designing and automatic business processes, whether it’s for Finance, HR, Customer Service, or IT. Pipefy’s no-code solution has proven to be extremely effective for companies looking to increase productivity by standardizing processes.

The Challenge of one-size-fits-all onboarding

Pipefy was welcoming users with a single horizontal onboarding experience. However, they felt constrained as they increased their efforts to drive more PLG. Pipefy’s offering has various verticals and they wanted personalized ways to onboard their users.

At the time they were only able to offer a one-size-fits-all onboarding to all of their customers. To drive retention, activation, and revenue via excellent onboarding, Pipefy looked towards a solution that would allow them to better personalize in-app guidance for their new users. 

Cue Chameleon

Pipefy wanted to deliver dynamic onboarding experiences, personalized to specific use cases instead of having one that is shown to all users. They needed a solution that would help users understand exactly how to succeed with Pipefy, thereby decreasing time to value, and increasing retention and adoption. 

For this, Pipefy searched far and wide. 

With Chameleon, they found the functionality and support to increase experimentation speed and boost their product's adoption.

Here's what made Chameleon stand out from the rest of the competition and how Pipefy successfully tested their hypothesis.

Superior configurations and ease of use helped Pipefy experiment faster

Pipefy found Chameleon Tours excelled at delivering sophisticated user experiences that were personalized to users' needs and behaviors. It was easy to create branded Walkthroughs that integrated into their UI and introduced users to the Pipefy platform. To create a better user experience the team leveraged the "Progress Indicator" and added a "Dismiss" button, so users could opt-out anytime.

When Pipefy built out their user onboarding with Chameleon, three things stood out for them: 

✅ The ease of leveraging user data to create custom audiences

✅ The broad styling options and intuitive UI/UX mechanics

✅ Being able to create personalized Checklists for different audiences

Deep integrations with best-in-class tools  

Another big factor that influenced Pipefy's success was the ability to integrate with other best-in-class tools. 

In particular, it was critical for Pipefy to leverage product analytics to understand the impact of their efforts. Built-in solutions found in other tools were far inadequate to meet their needs. Chameleon’s integration with best-in-class analytics platforms enabled them to look deeper into users' behaviors.

Let's see how Pipefy successfully engaged other verticals and validated their hypothesis.

Deploying verticalized onboarding with Chameleon 

With Chameleon's Launchers, Pipefy found the perfect solution to create onboarding Checklists, enabling them to highlight quick and actionable items that will help users in their journey. They also built more dedicated Walkthroughs based on users’ profiles, such as industry and desired use case. For each Checklist, Pipefy created specific audiences to ensure it would be seen by the different verticals they were engaging.

Leaving behind their horizontal approach to onboarding, Pipefy tailored their user flows to the vertical of each user type.

Pipefy found plenty of customization options and could easily control where each Checklist appeared with URL Rules, to ensure users could access Tours and help resources on specific pages.

The Chameleon effect on retention 

Pipefy's onboarding Walkthroughs averaged between 70% and 90% completion rates, signaling that users found value in Pipefy's guidance.

To truly prove that customized onboarding per vertical outperforms onboarding that is uniform across the entire product, the Pipefy team ran multiple experiments and found that personalized onboarding experiences had the best results. 

The impact on user retention was almost immediately visible: on days 8 to 14, Pipefy achieved between 20% and 30% in retention with Chameleon-built onboarding, more than doubling from their baseline of 7% to 12%. 

With a simple A/B test, they proved that verticalized onboarding that was more personalized to each user type drove more retention than horizontal education. 

What's next for Pipefy?

Having successfully leveraged personalized onboarding to increase retention, Pipefy will continue to fine-tune their onboarding experiences, beyond their use of Chameleon.

In the future, they look to experiment with onboarding tours based on user personas, or leverage CMK+K search patterns, such as HelpBar, to reduce friction when users get blocked.