Five things you must have in your customer insights hub

Without the right research infrastructure in place, identifying meaningful insights from piles and piles of qualitative customer data can be like finding needles in haystacks. For research teams and their stakeholders, using a customer insights hub can be what brings those insights to the forefront. Done right, it’s the muscle that makes product decision-making faster, lower risk, and more customer-centric. But beware. Not all customer insights hubs are built the same.

What is a customer insights hub?

If customer insights are the fuel that helps your product team make better decisions, a great customer insights hub is your engine. Built the right way and filled with enough gas, it should help you convert insights into action to propel your roadmap forward.

Simply put, a great customer insights hub serves as a single source of truth for your company’s customer data. It helps you get insights from large amounts of complex data so that you can make more customer-centric decisions.

What are some of the benefits of having a customer insights hub?

From research and product, to design and marketing, a great customer insights hub aligns the entire company on a single view of customers and the market. This can help your entire company improve quality control, communicate more consistently with customers, and confidently make decisions that truly put the customer first. It can take guesswork and labor out of analyzing complex data and give you the insights you need to deliver better products and services, faster.

Understanding your customers better means understanding your company better. A great insights hub will bring the voice of your customer to life in order to help you position your brand and product in the market. Make decisions your customers will love, take out competition, and capture more market share.

What are some of the “must-haves” to consider in your customer insights hub?

Support for every customer touchpoint

Without a holistic view of what customers are saying, it can be tricky to get a handle on what they want. Your customer insights hub should enable you to input data from the full gamut of customer touchpoints.

Transform all customer interactions into powerful insights

Dovetail offers a comprehensive platform with purpose-built solutions to store nearly every type of customer touchpoint:

• Projects provides a place to store and analyze customer calls, documents, surveys, and other artifacts that you are collecting as part of your research and discovery efforts.

• Channels allows you to stream continuous feedback sources such as support tickets, NPS responses, and more, and leverage AI to uncover trends hidden in mountains of data.

And with Channels, teams can continuously understand customer trends and sentiment from a large number of data sources like support tickets, app reviews, NPS responses, and more. Channels uses AI to automatically classify data into themes, complete with summaries, and sentiment so that you can get a quick pulse check on customer needs.

Make it pain-free to input data

As a researcher, you might be handling large amounts of data across various touchpoints. Perhaps this data lives in different places. Being able to get it all into your hub quickly can help you get the insights you need faster.

Need to analyze customer calls? Integrate your customer insights hub with Zoom or your calendar to get video call recordings uploaded instantly. Want to get industry reports, survey responses or other documents instantly added to your repository? Sync it with Google Drive or OneDrive to quickly upload documents. Have some unique systems or requirements? Use the Dovetail API to build the pathways you need between your insights hub and the systems you use.

The ability to make sense of complex data

Getting all of that customer data into your hub is only half the battle. Sifting through hours of sales call videos, thousands of survey responses and mountains of support tickets—each with their own structure and format—is not an easy feat.

An insights hub should provide tools that help make sense of your data, quickly. The best customer insights hub will let AI do a first pass of analyzing data while inviting humans in at the right points to review outputs.

Lean on AI for synthesizing complex data sets

AI is great at analyzing large, complex datasets. With Dovetail’s magic features, you can instantly transcribe (in the case of video and audio), summarize, highlight, and tag key moments in your data, creating highlight reels that you can share with your team in an instant. Detect themes in large data sets and uncover trends so that you can understand sentiment quickly.

And with Channels, teams can continuously understand customer trends and sentiment from a large number of data sources like support tickets, app reviews, NPS responses, and more. Channels uses AI to automatically classify data into themes, complete with summaries, and sentiment so that you can get a quick pulse check on customer needs.

Bring humans into the loop

Researchers have a unique set of skills that help them see things in data that AI still hasn’t mastered.

Once AI features take a first pass at analyzing data, your insights hub should then give you the opportunity to review the outputs. Use your human touch to adjust outputs and ensure you are getting as much out of your customer data as you can.

Structure to help organize data efficiently

If your insights hub doesn’t give you the ability to effectively structure your data, then it’s at risk of living in another silo. The right structure enables you to detect trends dynamically and continually understand your customers.

Create the right taxonomies

Dovetail makes it easy to create and enforce taxonomies across all data types. Tagging capabilities combined with AI-powered theme detection provide an easy way to structure your data and see trends at a glance. Uncover trends, not only across various data types, but across metadata fields such as industry, persona, company size, and others that help anyone effectively segment data for further synthesis. Adjust tags on the fly and isolate and analyze data in different ways to extract the insights you need.

Drive alignment faster with templates

For many companies, customer research falls in the hands of those who are not technically researchers. Designers, product managers and sales people, for instance, often find themselves straddling the tasks of engaging with customers while also pulling insights from what these customers are saying.

To drive alignment faster, it can be incredibly helpful to have customer research templates in your insights hub. These will help to ensure that everyone in the company follows best practices and will make it easier for anyone to bring the voice of the customer to life.

Safety and security

Your customer data is the fuel that drives customer-centricity in your organization. By nature, it’s also filled with risk. Protecting customer data is top priority for companies of all sizes. To help to mitigate risk there are a few things that you can look for.

Check for certifications and attestations

A certification like ISO 27001, or a SOC 2 report, indicates that a company is actively putting controls in place to protect customer data. Investments to meet regulatory requirements are also good; Dovetail has a HIPAA compliance add-on for customers on the Enterprise plan. This comes with access controls and features to help manage PHI, such as advanced restrictions on sharing, access, and data exporting.

Set up guardrails

Having the right guardrails in place can help to ensure that you’re safely interacting with customer data companywide. Feature sets like redaction and face blurring are great for protecting research participants’ privacy. Setting the right organizational structure across your user groups and permissions can help to enhance security in a way that works for your organization. Cordon off certain data sets from broad swathes of the organization and maintain control over sensitive data across your whole organization.

Nail your AI privacy

Using AI features as part of your customer research processes is a no-brainer for any company wanting to maintain a competitive edge and keep up with the pace of innovation. But customer data mixed with black box AI models can be a recipe for disaster. Black box models, by definition, offer little insight into how they make decisions. This lack of transparency can muddy up compliance within your company and reduce trust among customers.

To mitigate risk, your insights hub should be clear and transparent on their AI models, and whether or not customer data is used to train them. Dovetail never provides customer data to its model vendors, so your data will never leave the Dovetail platform until you want it to.

Check out the Dovetail Trust center to learn how Dovetail works to ensure that the safety and privacy of data is baked into everyday processes.

Built-in democratization

When information is siloed, it’s harder to get things done. Fragmentation of information between teams often means that people aren’t getting the insights they need to make informed decisions that put the customer and business first.

Your insights hub should make it incredibly easy for anyone in the company to report, share and search insights.

Report on customer knowledge across the entire organization

A great customer insights hub will make it drop-dead easy to extract rich customer insights into outputs that are easy to digest. Whether it’s a highlight from a customer conversation, a summary of a recent call, or in-depth report spanning various feedback sources, everyone should be able to interact with, and report on, customer knowledge.

Share insights to where work gets done

An insights hub should make it easy for everyone to interact with customer knowledge, regardless of what they do in your company. Once insights are uncovered, your insights hub should feed that knowledge to the places where work gets done. Whether it’s the design team building mockups in Figma, to the product team planning their roadmap in ProductBoard, and everywhere else, it should be easy to funnel knowledge into every corner of your organization.

Search insights. Get answers

The best insights hubs, when they have enough data, will make anyone in your company feel empowered to ask burning customer questions. With Dovetail, you can ask questions like, “what are our users’ top pain points?”, or “how can I best position our solution against competitor x?”. Instantly get guidance from your customer knowledge base by asking the questions that matter most. And with Ask Dovetail, you can make queries and get answers directly in Slack and Microsoft Teams. Set up regular digests that proactively deliver new insights directly to you.

Dovetail is your AI-first customer insights hub. Transform all customer interactions into powerful insights that can be used to drive product development, improve sales pitches, refine product messaging, and perfect the user experience. Try Dovetail for free today.