Doing lightweight research in Dovetail

We know how it is—your plate is full, and juggling core responsibilities often leaves little room for dedicated customer research. You know that understanding your users is the secret to success—it’s the bedrock of customer understanding that drives better products, more intuitive designs, resonant messaging, and ultimately, a thriving business. Those who truly connect with their audience consistently outperform the competition. Yet, the reality bites: most of us aren’t full-time researchers with endless hours for in-depth studies. Instead, gathering insights often happens in the margins—during brief lulls between meetings, while waiting for that build to finish, or in those fleeting moments of downtime.

But don’t despair! These small pockets of time can still yield significant insights. At Dovetail, we’ve built a platform specifically designed to empower everyone on your team to conduct lightweight research—efficient, impactful explorations that fit into your busy schedule. Here’s how you can leverage Dovetail to make the absolute most of those moments and consistently tap into the voice of your customer:

Uncover insights in the data you already collect

Dovetail is designed to help you unlock the valuable nuggets hidden within your existing data, faster than you ever thought possible. Maybe you’re lucky enough to find some cycles to talk to some customers, send out a survey, or finally read through those market reports. But sifting through transcripts, spreadsheets, and lengthy documents to extract meaningful insights can be time-consuming and feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Our magic features are designed to accelerate customer analysis and make insight discovery easy. Dovetail lets you transform complex, unstructured data into actionable steps that drive your product roadmap, sales strategies, or everyday decision-making.

• Get to the moments you need, faster. Gone are the days of painstakingly noting key moments from customer calls. Our AI-powered analysis features get you to the heart of the conversation quickly. Dovetail automatically transcribes call recordings and highlights key quotes, pain points, moments of delight, and more. Highlights are instantly shareable with your team, ensuring that valuable customer voice doesn’t get lost in lengthy transcripts. 

• Understand themes in your data. Got lots of highlights across various data types? Use magic cluster to immediately uncover top themes. With a single click, our AI analyzes your highlights and automatically groups them into meaningful themes. Imagine quickly seeing that “confusing navigation” is a top theme emerging from both your recent customer interviews and your latest batch of support tickets—a clear signal for immediate attention.

• Summarize, present and share your findings. With magic summaries, hours of customer conversations are transformed into clear, actionable takeaways instantly. Choose between frameworks like usability test, customer call, sales (SPICED), and more, and get the summaries you need in a format that is tailored to the task at hand. Present your key findings instantly. With magic insights, you can automatically transform customer calls, documents, and survey results into structured reports that are ready to share.

Continually monitor continuous feedback

Valuable customer feedback is likely flowing into your organization every single day through various channels—support tickets, NPS scores, product reviews, social media mentions, and more. These streams of continuous feedback are a goldmine of insights, but manually monitoring and analyzing them can feel like an insurmountable task.

Channels is specifically designed to tap into this constant flow of the customer voice and make it manageable and easy to understand. Our AI thematically classifies data points to show you high-level trends in real-time, which dynamically update as new data flows in. Visualize and segment data so you can pinpoint the insights that matter most. 

• Connect your existing feedback sources—Zendesk, Intercom, SurveyMonkey, and many others—directly to Dovetail Channels. No more manual exporting and importing—the insights come to you.

• Visualize and segment for deeper understanding: Raw data can be overwhelming. Channels leverages purpose-built AI to visualize your continuous feedback in meaningful ways. See the distribution of sentiment over time, identify spikes in specific themes, and segment your data based on various criteria, including product version, customer segment, support ticket priority, and more. This visual approach makes it easy to pinpoint the insights that truly matter and understand how different customer groups are experiencing your product or service.

• Collaborate with Channels’ AI to refine your understanding: Dovetail puts you in control of your insights. Work directly with our AI to refine the automatically generated themes and topics. You can edit pre-defined topics and descriptions, or add your own based on new data coming in or emerging patterns you identify. 

Just ask Dovetail—instant answers at your fingertips

Sometimes, you have a specific, burning question about your customers. You don’t have time for a full research project, but you need an answer now to inform a critical decision. For teams that have embraced the power of a central customer intelligence platform by consistently feeding their feedback into Dovetail, the answers are often just a search away.

• Chat with your customer data: contextual chat lets you interact with any level or element of your data—documents, feedback, user interviews, surveys, or even entire folders, projects, and channels—and get real-time responses. Viewing responses from a recent user survey? Simply ask – “What are customers saying about the new onboarding flow?” Looking at a specific customer call? Ask “What were the key concerns the prospect raised about our pricing model?” Dovetail will give you answers scoped to your specific focus. Continue the conversation by asking follow-up questions and gain more context.

• Ask Dovetail in Slack or Teams—insights where you work: To make access to customer insights even more seamless, we’ve brought the power of Dovetail directly into the communication tools your team already uses every day—Slack and Microsoft Teams. Ask your customer questions directly within your team’s channels. Dovetail will respond with concise summaries and relevant citations, providing quick answers without requiring you to leave your workflow. For a regular pulse on key customer trends, you can set up automated audio digests of relevant insights to be delivered directly to your team’s channels—ensuring everyone stays informed without having to actively search. It’s like a podcast on what your customers are saying about your product. And the best part? Anyone in your organization can use Ask–no Dovetail account required! 

You don’t need to be a professional researcher with weeks of dedicated time to understand your customers deeply. Dovetail empowers everyone on your team to conduct impactful, lightweight research within the natural flow of their work. By leveraging the data you already have, continuously monitoring incoming feedback, and having instant access to a wealth of customer knowledge, you can make customer-centricity a core part of your daily decision-making.

The voice of your customer is waiting to be heard—Dovetail makes it easy. Speak with our sales team or try it today.