When validating your assumptions for a decision you need to make, it's common to start digging for knowledge that already exists across teams at your organization. With Dovetail, anyone can self-serve information across different teams and departments in your organization. In this lesson, you will learn three key ways to search for insights across Dovetail to promote cross-functional collaboration and discover what is already known about your customers.
Keyword search is the most common form of search engine that you may have used in tools like Google Drive or OneDrive. If you're used to navigating your Dovetail workspace and know the titles of what you're looking for, you can use keywords to surface specific interviews, research reports, Channels themes and other documentation in the workspace.
To do a keyword search, navigate to the sidebar and select Ask and search
.
From there, enter the title of the interview, report, or document you are looking for. Results from your query will populate within the search dialog without you needing to press enter.
Alongside the traditional keyword search, Dovetail's chat feature allows anyone to query data in a conversational interface, powered by Claude 3.7 Sonnet. With Chat, anyone is empowered to access important customer knowledge. Here are just a few ways you can use it.
Use case | Question |
---|---|
Refine your approach | After reviewing a sales call transcript, ask Chat: "What questions could I have asked to understand the customer's needs better?" |
Uncover gaps | Within a research project, ask: "What adjacent topics are mentioned but not deeply explored in this data?" Use the insights to kickstart recruitment for your next study. |
Generate high-level reports | At the workspace level, ask: "Summarize the most common customer frustrations mentioned across all feedback projects this quarter" for a quick VoC report for leadership. |
Accelerate onboarding | New team members can click into different projects and use Chat to ask: "What was the primary goal of this discovery research?" or "Summarize the key recommendations from this project" to get up to speed faster. |
Chat works across your entire workspace and will auto-apply contextual filters based on where you are. This means you can drill down on a specific document or call, zoom out to all data across a Project or expand to ask questions to every piece of data in your workspace.
To use Chat, click Chat
in the sidebar or use keyboard shortcut ⌘ J or Ctrl J
wherever you are in the workspace and enter any questions you have about your customers.
The chat experience isn't limited to inside the Dovetail ecosystem. You can also search and chat out of Dovetail with Ask Dovetail. If your organization has connected Ask Dovetail on Slack or Teams, simply type /Dovetail
in a channel followed by your question.
The more information you can provide, the better! Some examples of questions you could build upon include:
What are the biggest customer onboarding pain points?
Which features generate the most positive sentiment?
How are customer needs around [feature name] changing over time?
Where do users find the most friction in [product name]?
What are users saying about our mobile app?
How can we improve customer satisfaction with our pricing model?
What features do customers consistently request?
In search, you can also conduct 1-to-1 keyword matching in the results set by adding quotation marks around the query term. This limits your search to words in the precise order specified. For example, searching for "click and collect"
will only find results that include those three words side by side and in that order.
In Dovetail, this is helpful if looking for exact quotes from interviews, specific feature phrases, custom terminology at your organization, or industry jargon.
To search an exact phrase where the words are in a specific order, type quotation marks around your search terms and enter.
From there, results from your query will populate, matching the exact term used.
Determine what you want to learn about your customers and ask your insights hub a question using search.
Lesson 3: Engage your team to inform decisions
Learn ways you can engage your team to build a customer-centric culture with data.
Last updated: 10 April 2025
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