A PM’s guide to evaluating post-launch sentiment with Channels

As a product manager, you’re constantly pushing to build and release new features that differentiate your solution in the market. But shipping features is only half the battle—understanding how users react to these solutions is critical. Over time, this understanding helps you to cultivate the deep customer knowledge that lets you build a product roadmap strategy that you stand confidently behind. This is also critical for aligning stakeholders including designers, engineers, and leadership so that you efficiently work together towards your shared goals. The challenge? Finding time to dig through mountains of customer feedback to understand sentiment. From support tickets to app store reviews, NPS scores, and more. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to make sense of it all!

Here’s where Dovetail's Channels comes in. Channels transforms how PMs can track post-launch customer reactions by automatically turning continuous feedback into real-time, actionable insights. You no longer need to spend time manually analyzing support tickets or scheduling endless customer calls. Channels analyzes your ongoing flow of customer feedback—such assupport tickets to app store reviews, NPS scores, and more—so that you can understand sentiment quickly during the post launch period and beyond.

So how can you use Channels to analyze post-launch sentiment?

Connect your data sources

Getting started with Channels is straightforward. Simply head to Dovetail and connect your feedback sources. With Channels, you can stream support tickets, app store reviews, CSAT scores, and more into Dovetail.

Note that Channels is only available on Dovetail’s Professional and Enterprise plans. If you are currently on our Free tier, you can upgrade from your Billing page under Settings, or you can reach out to our team for help.

Once configured, the integration happens seamlessly in the background, ensuring you always have the latest customer feedback at your fingertips—at the time of launch, after launch, and on an ongoing basis. With AI built into its core, Channels organizes your data into themes, making it easy to focus on specific aspects of your product or features. Incoming data is continuously processed, so there's no need to manually refresh or update your view—everything happens automatically. Instead of jumping between different tools and platforms, you now have a centralized hub where all your customer feedback comes together, processed, and organized for immediate insight. This means that while it’s the perfect resource for analyzing post-launch sentiment, Channels gives you an ongoing voice of customer across all of your product’s functionality and lets you discover insights on the fly from continuous, real-time feedback.

Transform feedback into instant insights

Stream the voice of your customer directly from tools like Zendesk, Intercom, and other platforms into a single view. The magic happens through Dovetail's AI, which automatically classifies incoming feedback into clear themes and provides dynamic summaries that update as new data flows in. This means you can instantly spot patterns and track sentiment changes without the manual effort of combing through data.

For example, if you've just released updates to one of your app’s features, Channels will automatically organize related feedback into themes, helping you quickly understand if users are experiencing issues or providing positive feedback on improvements.

Understand sentiment, fast

Quickly spot patterns and track the impact of your product updates. You can easily switch between different chart types and adjust the time frame to focus on specific periods—whether you're looking at daily, weekly, or monthly trends. Easily track changes in feedback volume and sentiment over time. Let’s say you’ve recently released a series of bug fixes following an influx of support tickets, indicating that customers were experiencing issues with a certain feature. Now, you want to do a quick pulse check to see if you’re getting fewer complaints. In the past, you might have ventured into your support platform, downloaded some data, and tried to muddle your way through a giant CSV. With Channels, all of this data is streamed into a single view, giving you a quick visualization of support ticket volume, pertaining to any particular theme over time. This means you can quickly see if support ticket volume has died down after your bug fixes or whether further investigation is required.

Drill deeper into user pain points

Advanced filtering capabilities enable you to segment your data to uncover specific insights about different user groups. Want to understand how your student plan users are responding to recent changes? Simply add a filter for "Student" plan type and instantly see relevant feedback and trends for that segment.

This granular view helps you identify unique pain points or opportunities that you might miss with a holistic view of your data. You might discover that while overall sentiment is positive, certain user groups are experiencing specific challenges that need addressing.

Turn insights into actions

Armed with clear, data-driven insights from Channels, you can make confident decisions about your product roadmap and strategy. Channels helps you identify both quick wins for immediate implementation and longer-term strategic opportunities.

When you spot a trend in customer feedback, you can easily share these insights with your team, backing up your product decisions with real user data. This helps align stakeholders around customer-driven priorities. The real-time nature of Channels means you can continuously monitor the impact of your changes and course correct as needed. This creates a dynamic feedback loop between your product decisions and customer reactions, ensuring your roadmap stays aligned with user needs.

Channels transforms the way product teams understand and act on customer feedback. With AI, Channels enables you to get instant insights that help drive your product strategy forward while always keeping you in the driver’s seat. Start using Channels on Dovetail today to make faster, more confident product decisions backed by real customer sentiment.