Setting up your AI-first repository in Dovetail

Businesses lose millions in revenue by missing out on critical customer insights and dealing with misaligned teams. This is a common reality for those struggling to manage and centralize customer data effectively.

That’s where Dovetail comes in. It centralizes all your calls, documents, and feedback, using advanced AI to analyze data and surface actionable insights. This enables everyone in your organization to instantly access customer data, improving both customer satisfaction and the bottom line—all while maintaining enterprise-grade security. But don’t just take our word for it:

In this post, I’ll walk you through five simple steps to set up your own AI-first repository in Dovetail, and how it can transform your organization into a customer-first culture. Plus, I'll share pro tips to maximize your repository’s potential.

What is a repository?

Imagine a ‘Wiki’ for your organization’s customer knowledge: a centralized, searchable database of research and insights that the entire company leverages to make better decisions. A single source of truth that empowers stakeholders to engage with research and fosters a customer-centric culture across your organization. Designers, product managers, sales, support, and more can effortlessly pull up insights that answer common questions and, in one click, explore the evidence—and understand the context—that led to those insights. A research repository is just that—one central place, or source of truth, where everyone in your organization can go to find the latest insights from your research team.

Dovetail is revolutionizing how organizations manage customer insights. Leveraging advanced AI, we’ve transformed the traditional research repository. No more endless hours sifting through data or struggling to extract meaningful insights. Dovetail’s powerful AI does the heavy lifting, turning unstructured feedback into insights that anyone in your organization can reference again and again.

How to get started

If your team are aren’t aligned behind the customer or waste time hunting down insights across tools and teams, now’s the time to set up your repository in Dovetail. It’s simple—you can do it in just five steps, and it takes under an hour.

1. Set up your workspace

Try Dovetail’s Professional plan—it’s free for seven days. Follow the prompts in product to get your workspace up and running. This includes choosing a name for your workspace—we suggest starting with your company name, but you can change it later.

2. Import calls, docs, and feedback

Gather all your customer feedback and research—sales calls, survey results, support tickets, and user interviews—to build a rich dataset. Bringing existing data into one place allows you to create a comprehensive view of your customers that’s accessible to those who need it.

Projects are where you store and organize all your data, including highlights, tags, and insights. To create your first project, click Browse in the top nav, Create, then Project. Import MP4s, PDFs, and CSVs from your files or set up an integration to import automatically. You can create different projects for different types of data, customer segments, and projects—whatever works for your team.

3. Instant analysis

Once you’ve imported your data, Dovetail automatically identifies key takeaways with Magic summarize and prepares your data for analysis with Magic transcribe. You can work with Dovetail’s AI-engine to find important moments in your data with Magic highlight that you can easily turn into reels or short video playlists for your team.

4. Discover insights

At this stage, you’ve created a project in Dovetail. But what if I want to see if there are other projects or data that can help me better understand my customers? Navigate to the Search bar and discover insights from your customer data. Ask, “What are the main customer pain points?”, “Top objections in sales calls,” “What features do customers love?”—whatever you want to discover in your repository.

Your search results will be automatically summarized. Plus, you can click Add to insight to make the results shareable with your team.

You can hit Filter to narrow in on a specific date range, project, or note, then Summarize to get a summary including citations that you can share with your team.

5. Get your team involved

Foster collaboration by inviting your team to contribute to the repository. Bringing your team into the process means they’ll be able to contribute their customer data to create an even more comprehensive repository, plus find answers across everything that’s already in your repository.

Share this blog with your team so they can bring their data into Dovetail. Plus, encourage them to ask questions in Dovetail. Share examples based on your specific product, service, or customers, for example:

• What do customers think about [feature]?

• What are the unique needs and pain points of [customer segment]?

• How satisfied are customers with [specific product or service] overall?

• What are the key differentiators between our product and competitors?

Many customers host a workshop to get everyone up to speed in a few hours. The workshop helps to align on what kinds of data should live in Dovetail (e.g., interviews, usability tests, NPS feedback, industry reports), how your team can import customer data, and how to discover insights using magic search.

For more inspiration, check out this recent blog post on questions to ask you insights hub.

That’s all you need to set up a simple repository so everyone in your organization can access the insights they need to make better, customer-informed decisions.

Level up your repo

You’ve set up your team’s repository. It’s time to make it even more powerful. Depending on the needs of your team, try one, many, or all of these tips to unblock teams, standardize the research process, and make insights easier to find.

Organize projects

To make projects easy to find for users in your workspace, organize your them into folders. Group your projects into folders by type of research, product team, or department/role.

Set up templates for your team

Managers in Dovetail can create project and insight templates to help standardize research across their organization. They can also give teams a starting set of data, tags, and project configurations to skip the set-up process, kick-start new projects, and produce insights faster.

Set up single sign-on

Enable SSO to allow your users to easily sign in to your workspace.

Create a home for your insights

Make your team feel at home. Customize your workspace home to suit your team’s individual needs. Configure multiple feeds that focus on different topics, change the layout and content or use search blocks to keep it feeling fresh.

Note that some of these features are available only to Enterprise customers.

By following these steps, you’ll be well on your way to creating a powerful research repository that empowers your team to make data-driven decisions and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Try Dovetail Professional—it’s free for seven days.