Is automated UI onboarding hurting your activation rates?

We wasted three full months building a super slick, interactive product tour with fancy tooltips and progress bars, thinking users would love setting things up on their own. Reality check? Over 70% of people just slammed the "Skip" button, clicked around aimlessly for two minutes, and ghosted us forever without connecting a single integration.

In a moment of pure desperation, we threw out the whole automated walkthrough and replaced it with a plain email offering a quick 10-minute 1-on-1 setup call. It felt like a massive step backward, but our activation rate instantly jumped to 65%. Turns out, actually sitting down with someone and setting up their account to solve their specific problem beats a shiny product tour every single time.

Are automated UI tours completely overhyped for early users, or is manual, high-touch onboarding the only real way to survive the early days?