Scaling research for smarter business decisions: How Dovetail empowers enterprises

Editor’s note: This article was first published on December 5th, 2023, and has since been revised for clarity and accuracy.

Your organization makes daily decisions about product strategy, customer experience, and market positioning. But how often are these decisions backed by research that is comprehensive, consistent, and readily accessible?

Too often, enterprises struggle to scale research effectively, leading to fragmented insights, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities. Dovetail empowers orgs to centralize, manage, and scale enterprise research ops—turning research into a strategic asset for business growth.

What is research ops?

Enterprise research ops, also known as research operations (ReOps), is the discipline of optimizing the people, processes, and tools that support research at scale. As organizations grow, managing research becomes more complex. Teams must recruit participants, standardize methodologies, ensure compliance, and synthesize insights efficiently. Research efforts often become disjointed without a structured ReOps function, limiting their impact on business strategy. A strong ReOps framework helps enterprises extract maximum value from research by ensuring consistency, efficiency, and accessibility of insights, allowing leadership to make faster, more informed decisions.

5 ways a customer insights hub like Dovetail can help scale research

Scaling research requires more than just collecting data—it demands a structured approach to managing insights across teams, tools, and processes. Here’s how Dovetail helps enterprises streamline research operations and maximize impact:

1. Stop repeating research, centralize all your data

Enterprises generate vast customer data, but insights are scattered across teams and tools without a centralized system. With Dovetail, research ops consolidates qualitative and quantitative research—interviews, support tickets, surveys, NPS scores, and more—into a single, searchable customer insights hub. Centralizing your customer knowledge ensures decision-makers can access the full spectrum of customer insights, reducing redundant efforts and accelerating informed decision-making.

2. Empower your ReOps team with standardized practices

With so many customer conversations, things can quickly get out of hand, and scaling research across global teams requires consistency. Dovetail helps enterprises establish standardized UX research ops processes and governance, ensuring that data collection and analysis follow best practices. By reducing variability, organizations can trust their insights and confidently make strategic decisions.

• Implement a scalable workspace architecture to streamline team collaboration. Customize tags to align with your projects for enhanced organization and insight tracking.

• Enhance consistency with Dovetail templates. Standardize processes across teams quickly, ensuring alignment and efficiency in project execution.

3. Equip your team to present insights that align with enterprise priorities

Your research team provides valuable insights, but the return on investment (ROI) may go unnoticed if these insights are not effectively communicated. Research should be integrated into strategic decisions at every level and not confined to silos. Equip your team with the tools necessary to present insights in a clear and compelling format that aligns with business objectives.

• Customizable reports and data references enable you to highlight key findings and ensure they resonate with stakeholders.

• Use the voice of the customer (VoC) through highlight reels—concise, impactful videos that capture the essence of your findings, making it easy for executives to grasp key takeaways.

• Ensure visibility and engagement with seamless integrations into Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian. Keep stakeholders informed and involved, promoting a culture of continuous, insight-driven decision-making.

• Track the long-term impact of your research with detailed metrics and analytics on workspace activity, from project outputs to stakeholder engagement. Understand what resonates most, and demonstrate the sustained value of your team's work.

4. Ensure enterprise-grade security and compliance

Enterprises must balance research agility with security and compliance. Dovetail provides enterprise-grade security features, including role-based access control, custom data retention, single sign-on (SSO), and compliance with data privacy regulations. 

Additionally, Dovetail automates retention by allowing teams to define retention periods for different types of research data. This ensures that research is securely stored and organized, with data automatically archived or deleted when no longer needed. It reduces manual workloads and ensures compliance, empowering your organization to scale research while safeguarding sensitive information.

5. Enable organization-wide access to customer insights

Making research accessible across the organization ensures that every team—from product to marketing to leadership—can make informed decisions. Dovetail offers tools like Magic Analysis and Ask Dovetail in Slack and Microsoft Teams, bringing the voice of the customer to life and empowering everyone in the org to make customer-centric decisions. By integrating research into everyday tools, enterprises can drive a customer-centric culture at every level.

Let Dovetail help you scale research ops

With Dovetail, enterprises can transform research from an operational function into a strategic advantage. 

By centralizing insights, standardizing processes, engaging stakeholders, ensuring security, and managing complexity, organizations can scale research effectively. This leads to smarter business decisions, accelerated innovation, and improved customer experiences.

Are you ready to maximize the impact of research within your organization? Learn how Dovetail can help your enterprise scale research for long-term success. Request a demo today.