How Puzzle increased top-of-funnel conversion by 3x with Knock AI

High-Intent Buyers Didn’t Fit Into Forms

Good content wasn't landing. Puzzle had pages, videos, documentation, all of it explaining clearly what the product does. The expectation was that visitors would understand the product from the site.

Most didn't. Buyers kept arriving with basic questions about what Puzzle does. They were skipping past the content no matter how well-written and how clearly it spelled things out.

"You can put as many pages, as much content, video, whatever you want. People maybe look at it for a few seconds at the most," said Ozgur Uzuner, Chief Marketing Officer at Puzzle.

Forms made the gap worse. A form treats everyone the same and asks everyone the same questions, which assumes every buyer has the same needs. For accounting software, that's not the case. Founders, bookkeepers, and firms all show up with different problems. Asking them to fill out a blanket form before they understood the product just gave them another reason to leave.

One agent, many paths

Puzzle runs different paths for different moments. On the homepage, the first job is figuring out which buyer a visitor is to route them to the right team, founders on one side and accounting firms on the other. Inside the onboarding flow, the same tool shifts to support, catching people right when they get stuck.

That flexibility makes Knock AI work for both self-serve and sales-led buyers. Self-serve users get help at the exact moment they'd normally get lost and quit. Sales-led buyers with a quick question get an answer without being forced into a 30-minute meeting they didn't want.

Before, Puzzle could only ask people to book a meeting or not. "Knock brings that personalization. It answers one question or answers a slew of questions for 30 minutes, depending on what that user needs," Oz shared.

Knock AI also opens a faster door when someone wants a person. Rather than booking a call and waiting days, a human can jump in and start an instant meeting right in the moment. "That's a much better UX than schedule a call, wait for a few days," Oz said.

Answers that fit the buyer

Knock AI is trained on Puzzle's help docs, so it handles technical migration questions on its own. Migrating off QuickBooks is never one-to-one, and it depends on which modules a company actually uses.

A form can't pinpoint that. A conversation can. Knock AI asks what someone is running in QuickBooks before explaining how migration would work, instead of handing over a generic list of steps.

Engagement was up, even when traffic was down

About 10 to 15% of Puzzle's traffic now engages with Knock AI in some way, compared with the roughly 5% who used to book a meeting up front. More people are talking to Puzzle before they self-serve, which means fewer of them get lost and drop off mid-onboarding.

The clearest signal showed up in Google Analytics. Puzzle was going through a seasonal dip and top-of-funnel traffic fell as expected. Engagement climbed 3x anyway, within about two months of going live.

"It's not about how many people come to your website. It's about what they do when they get there," Oz said.

There's an argument Oz hears constantly: adding a chat step lengthens the funnel, so it must hurt conversion. He disagrees. "It's okay to add steps to your conversion funnel if it's going to help you convert. This is not a game of having the least amount of steps."

The payoff shows up in the sales conversations. Knock AI doesn't simply shorten the path to a sale, it improves its quality. Because the chat history carries over, account executives can pull up what a prospect already asked and tailor the call around it instead of opening with the same generic questions. The context is already there before a human joins in.

Keeping the buyers a form would lose

One example stuck with Oz. To use Puzzle, you connect a bank account so the platform can pull the data it needs. But bookkeepers manage the books for their clients, so the bank account isn't theirs to connect. They'd hit that step in onboarding, get asked for login info they don't have and shouldn't have, and leave. Puzzle was turning away a whole category of qualified users.

Now the Knock AI button sits right there in the onboarding flow. When a bookkeeper gets stuck, they say so, and Puzzle walks them through a workaround that lets them get into the app and connect their clients' accounts instead.

"Companies don't only have happy paths. They have a lot of unhappy paths. Knock really helps there," Oz said.

An engagement tool, not an answer tool

Oz explains that you have to consider what you’re optimizing for. A chatbot may be fine for rote support questions or after-hours coverage. But if you want engagement, education, and personalization, you need a different level of tool. "An engagement tool versus just an answer tool. They're quite different by design," he said.

For Puzzle, Knock AI turned a website people skimmed into a place where buyers actually talk. Getting there didn't require a long, painful rollout. A few weeks to fine-tune the routing, train the AI, and place the buttons, then ongoing iteration from there. The Knock AI team ships new features regularly, and Oz keeps finding more to fold in.

That keeps mattering as the conversations get harder. The more complex the use case, the more a static page falls short and the more there is for a real conversation to do. Oz admitted he didn't expect this going in. "I saw Knock more like an advanced chatbot," he said. "But once I started using it, I realized it's a lot more than that."