How Dovetail uses Channels to ensure customer feedback is at the heart of product decisions

Channels helps product teams automatically turns continuous user feedback into real-time, actionable insights. Since we launched in beta earlier this year, we’ve been testing Channels with the Dovetail team and a select group of customers. We’ve been excited to see the interesting and unexpected ways it’s being used to connect with customers and listen to feedback in real time.

How it works

Channels uses AI to automatically categorize mountains of customer feedback, surfacing insights to fuel product decisions. You can connect tools—like Intercom, Zendesk, and Zapier—to track support tickets, app reviews, churn reasons, win/loss analyses, and more, all in one place. Channels tracks themes for you in real time so you can stop skimming endless feedback feeds and start making data-backed decisions.

Automating Dovetail’s VoC program

For a long time, managing Voice of the Customer (VoC) at Dovetail was a full-time job shared across the support and product team. It involved manually importing feedback from multiple locations, tagging it, and synthesizing it into actionable insights. The team would present their findings, hoping that someone would take action. It often felt like shouting into a void.

Pat Barlow, Dovetail’s Customer Support Lead, saw Channels as the perfect solution to this time-consuming, manual process. Pat became our in-house early adopter, integrating Dovetail’s support tickets from Front, Intercom, and NPS feedback via our API. In just 15 minutes, Pat connected Dovetail’s tools, and the themes started rolling in.

The initial themes from Channels were good, and Pat fine-tuned them even further by splitting larger themes and removing irrelevant ones. With our new VoC program set up in Channels, there was no more manual tagging or tedious report generation—Channels instantly transformed how we process user feedback.

This automation saves hours of manual work, and the centralized feedback makes it easier for other teams to access insights and make data-driven decisions without needing to comb through messy, incomplete reports. The result? A far more efficient and impactful VoC process.

Escalating issues early

Channels helps validate our assumptions about the biggest customer pain points, and makes it easier to escalate problems within the company. When product issues are flagged, it isn’t just a single voice raising the concern—we now have a well-documented, theme-driven analysis backed by real-time customer feedback.

While doing roadmap planning, we use Channels to surface themes across NPS feedback and support tickets. Instead of anecdotally mentioning feedback in meetings, we use Channels to pull concrete examples and quantify how often the problem occurred. This allows our team to feel confident in making decisions backed by clear, data-driven insights.

By automatically pulling NPS feedback, support tickets, and churn reasons into Channels, our product teams have access to the information they need, bringing them closer to our go-to-market teams.

Democratizing customer feedback

Before Channels, customer feedback often felt siloed. Only the support team had access to tools like Front or Intercom, where many valuable insights live. This limited access made it difficult for other teams, like design, to get the feedback they needed to improve features.

Channels changed that. Because it sits on top of the Dovetail platform, those valuable feedback insights are available to anyone. Designers, product people, marketers—everyone can use magic search and Ask Dovetail to find insights across in-depth research as well as the short form verbatim and feedback that lives in our Insights Hub.

For example, Dovetail product designer Jess Pang was working on improving the onboarding experience. With Channels, she was able to search for onboarding-related feedback across various feedback sources and pull out key insights without needing to ask the support team.

The democratization of feedback has also led to more collaboration across teams and faster decision-making, as team members no longer need to request feedback summaries or wait for support to generate reports.

In-product feedback is next

While Channels has already revolutionized how we leverage insights from support tickets and NPS responses, we’re just getting started. Next, we’re connecting in-product feedback to Channels, so we can capture insights directly from users as they interact with the platform.

With Channels, we’re creating a future where continuous, automated feedback loops fuel product decisions, helping Dovetail—and our customers—build better products faster. Get Channels today.