[CASE STUDY] How Groupize gamified their new user onboarding with Userpilot

When Justin Peticolas, the Manager of Implementation and Onboarding at Groupize,the modern meetings management platform unifying travel, spend, and compliance, learned his then-existing onboarding solution is shutting down, he had 6 days to find and implement a new user onboarding tool before their next big launch.

Based on a personal recommendation, they reached out to Userpilot. And in less than a week, they were ready to go. “I could recreate the content in Userpilot, ramp up and make the experiences look good very quickly. It saved the day.”

And not only saved the day – but led to developing G.G.- an innovative gamified onboarding assistant, that got Groupize a nomination for Skift Idea Awards 2022 “the travel industry’s most coveted achievement for excellence in design, creativity and innovation.”

PLG at the heart of the company

Since putting customers first and being user-friendly is at the heart of Groupize, Justin looked for a Product Adoption Platform that would be equally user-friendly and customer-centric:

“Groupize is a software platform that assists companies with managing group and corporate business travel and events, both from the spend management and attendee management perspective. Our platform differs from others out there in that we are really user-friendly. So unlike other event management technologies out there that require dedicated resources and lots of experience, Groupize is designed to “democratize events management”. It allows anyone regardless of their level of knowledge to use a technology tool to make their job easier.”

That’s why Groupize was looking for a tool like Userpilot – to make their tool even more-user friendly with self-paced onboarding.

“Because we have such a user-friendly tool, and there might be some training involved, we want the training company to be user-friendly. So a really good self-paced onboarding and training, and the ability to deliver content just-in-time for the users, was really important to us.” – said Justin.

Justin was looking for a tool that would both deliver timely content to Groupize’s users, and tell them more about product usage and adoption.

“As adoption was increasing coming out of COVID, we wanted to know more about what’s going on.”

And they found exactly that in Userpilot.

Award-winning G.G.

Moreover, with Justin’s creativity and Userpilot’s flexibility, they could gamify their onboarding by creating a Groupize Interactive Assistant – G.G. – ready to help Groupize users through Userpilot’s interactive elements. The idea was so innovative it even made the shortlist of Skift Idea Awards 2022 rewards – “the travel industry’s most coveted achievement for excellence in design, creativity and innovation.”

According to Justin: “G.G. stands for Groupize Guide, much like Siri or Alexa. G.G.’s always there when you need her. It’s like a having a professional event planner that spent years on the job inside the app, that that our users can ask for advice anytime. G.G. has the battle scars – theh have the lessons learned. And they’re passing on their knowledge about our tool to our users.”

Since some of Groupize’s users are “occasional planners” – doubling as office managers or executive admins, they may need extra help. G.G. offers it through onboarding tours, step-by-step checklists (this is where Userpilot is used to help G.G. deliver this) as well as live chat, LinkedIn page, and email address.

“The idea was to make her knowledgable and accessible when you need her, but not too pushy.”

“We used to have G.G. pop out with the help of Userpilot on every page, and got feedback it was a bit too much.”

Instead, Justin made G.G. more subtle, and utilized Userpilot’s Resource Center to let users summon G.G.’s help, as well as provide more detailed help articles.

Users can also trigger guided tours of each individual page of the app from the Resource Center:

Do you want to build guided tours in minutes using Userpilot? Sign up for free now!

Qualitative Difference in Support Tickets

After implementing G.G. with the help of Userpilot, Justin noticed a qualitative difference in the support tickets they are getting from their users:

“They are more focused and directed. People use G.G. as the first defense line, and only write to us if they could not find the answers via G.G., or via the learning center. So it’s less of the obvious questions like “how do I add a hotel” and more of specific queries “I have a problem adding a hotel. I followed these specific steps and something is not working…”

Groupize has seen a qualitative change to their support requests, which means their CS team is now mostly involved in answering questions that really need human intervention.

Justin also likes that he doesn’t need to “bother their engineers when there’s a release” to create “info-popups” using Userpilot’s native tooltips and inform users about the new functionalities and changes:

How Userpilot helped Groupize bring G.G. to life?

Justin found a great partner in Userpilot because of the tools’ really short the Time-To-Value:

“What I really like about Userpilot is that it’s very intuitive. I could build out content and flows with the Chrome extension, and nothing had to be installed or downloaded. I could just get in and start building, and that right in my own app – I didn’t have to build it somewhere else, and then open a separate window and keep refreshing like with some other technologies. I like that it’s basically real-time building, and I can see the results in real time.”

By the time Justin had his first onboarding call with Userpilot’s Customer Success team, it wasn’t so much about training them how to use Userpilot as about “confirming what they already knew” and “troubleshooting what they already did.”

“My ramp-up time was very very quick. Userpilot exceeded my expectations there.”

Book a Userpilot demo to see how we can help you improve your onboarding too.