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Accelo is an operations automation platform that helps small and medium-sized businesses automate and streamline their work into a single, integrated system. The cloud-based platform helps teams nurture client relations, collaborate on projects, and deliver consistent customer service and support.
Accelo serves users from a wide range of industries—including architecture, accounting, engineering, consulting, marketing, and IT. And these users each come with different experience levels, expectations, and needs. Accelo knows that providing contextual support at the right moment in their users’ experience is critical to improving product adoption.
But they didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. Instead, Lawrence Barreca, and the rest of the team at Accelo, aimed to leverage their existing help center—which was comprehensive and full of users FAQs—to deliver these resources at the relevant moment in a user’s journey.
Appcues became the key solution for Accelo's customer success team to scale operations.
Accelo needed to break up their approach into manageable phases. The first phase focused on improving new user onboarding while increasing usage of their help guides in a non-intrusive way.
To better onboard new users and guide them to activation, Lawrence created a welcome modal that primed users with a quick intro.
The welcome modal led to a video tutorial that set expectations about the platform.
After the video, users were guided through Accelo's key features to help them activate quickly.
Finally, Accelo gave users a chance to share their thoughts by offering an opportunity to provide feedback on the tour.
The survey confirmed they were on the right track, with 84% of respondents finding it helpful.
“This is great. It’s these little things that really have a huge impact on the user experience and allow people to 'self-serve' when they get stuck. It’s not only easier for the new user but frees up the time of the experienced user by not being asked a lot of questions.”
In phase one, Accelo also prioritized increasing engagement to their existing guides creating unique flows for each of their four products. Users triggered these flows by clicking the "Learn" button within the app.
Users could get an in-app walkthrough, watch a video, or read support guides for each of their products.
In phase two of Accelo’s mission, the team wanted to ensure transparency and responsiveness by providing on-demand guidance through hotspots.
The Accelo team used Heap and watched user sessions to identify patterns in user behavior. They noticed that many users were not engaging with the features that could make them more successful. In order to drive feature adoption, Lawrence placed 3 hotspots to drive key actions and improve engagement with help guides—and, ultimately, the feature itself.
The Accelo team used Heap to observe user sessions and identify common patterns in user behavior. They saw that the majority of users weren't engaging with features that could benefit them. So, Lawrence added 3 hotspots to drive key actions and improve engagement with help guides—and, ultimately, the feature itself.
Lastly, Accelo used well-placed callouts to drive new feature adoption. When they launched an enhanced Gantt Chart for users creating Project Plans, Lawrence and his team used an Appcues tooltip to highlight the new feature. Clicking the tooltip led users to a blog post that educated them on the new functionality.
What results did Accelo see after the conclusion of its phased approach to in-app messaging? Wins across the board!
Within a few days of launching their new flows, Accelo witnessed a 48% increase in feature activation. And the introduction of in-app walkthroughs was met with 84% of users noting them as helpful.
The team saw similar wins with their self-serve efforts with their new "Learn" flows achieving unprecedented results for all four of their products⎯including one that saw a 126% in usage.
“From a customer success standpoint, it was amazing to see that our users were not only initiating Appcues flows and going through these walkthroughs but they were actually finding the contextual information they were looking for with just two clicks and were also taking the prescribed action.”
In driving on-demand guidance, Accelo saw a drastic increase across all three data-backed hotspots including a 198% increase in tutorial view views, a 48% increase in feature activation, and a 187% increase in pageviews.
Moreover, the single tooltip announcing their new Gnatt Chart feature drove 253% in blog post views compared to a previous feature launched without a tooltip. The blog post attached to the Appcues tooltip surpassed the total views of similar blog posts in a day and got 4x the number of views in 2 weeks.
“Now whenever we launch a new product, the product team comes to me and asks me to create an Appcues flow for them which is amazing.”
There’s a lot packed into this story (cheers to you, Accelo, for some big wins! 🎉). But remember, small changes can have big impacts—and improving customer engagement isn’t one, long connected journey. It’s a series of micro-moments that meet users the instant they need help and guidance. Lesson learned: don’t take those tooltips for granted. 😉
