How our team uses Channels to make more customer-focused decisions

Last year, we published a blog post discussing how we used Channels to centralize our support tickets and NPS scores and gain a deeper understanding into our customers’ biggest pain points. Since then, we have doubled down on Channels, piping in not just feedback outside our product, but also inside, to help our product teams decide what to build next. Today, we’re sharing some of the ways that our team is using Channels in 2025, including some of our latest and greatest features, to make better decisions companywide.

At Dovetail, we know that continuous customer feedback is vital for creating exceptional products and experiences, which is why we developed Channels. Channels uses AI to automatically sort and categorize constant streams of customer data, unveiling hidden trends within. By integrating with platforms like Intercom and Zendesk, Channels centralizes feedback from support tickets. Through integrations via Zapier or our API, you can also continuously stream app reviews, churn analyses, and more, all into one place. It’s designed not only to provide real-time insights but also to foster ongoing customer learning, empowering teams to incorporate the voice of their customers into every decision. Since our last blog, we have added even more feedback sources to Channels. Here are some of our favorites. 

Win/loss feedback

We’ve added win/loss data from Salesforce into their own Channels to help us understand why our customers choose our solution over the competition, so we can better arm our sales and CS teams with the best positioning.

In-product data

We’ve got channels that are streaming in feedback data directly from our product. This was set up via Zapier integrations, and lets our AI analyze and thematically sort the heaps of feedback we are getting from our users while they use our product. We even have a channel with Channels feedback. How meta!

Churn reasons

We are tracking causes of customer churn from our self-service customer base so we can understand the tension points that cause people to stop using Dovetail, which helps our product and growth teams build solutions and experiments that can help improve the user experience.

How we bring the voice of our customers into every decision we make

We’ve seen the power of how Channels democratizes access to customer insights. Channels helps us bring the voice of our customers to life for every team by giving them valuable insights right at their fingertips. Here’s how we’re using it to democratize insights.

• We use our new themes hierarchy to provide more clarity. This allows us to keep all of our data organized. With this new view we can quickly dive into related theme groupings, without losing that top-level focus. It's been great exploring how we can better organize themes to support different levels of consumption, from macro/high-level to micro. This includes product teams looking to prioritize features, designers seeking evidence to support their design decisions, and our leadership team looking for high-level trends to influence our strategy. We love how much easier it is to scan and find the information we are looking for.

  

  

• We get specific when sharing insights. Improved sharing capabilities make it easier to share the right level of detail with stakeholders. We often deliver swift insights by sharing a concise theme summary or even a single piece of feedback when relevant. Other times, we may share all channel data for a period of time or with a particular filter set.

• We leverage Ask Dovetail to stream the voice of the customer into our team conversations. Channels data is now surfaced alongside Projects data in Ask Dovetail queries and digests. This means that our weekly digests in Slack—and every Ask Dovetail query—are infused with the most current customer insights.

What we have been learning along the way

One of the biggest takeaways from using Channels in our team is that leveraging a combination of AI and human input is the key to success. We let Channels’ AI do the heavy lifting—categorizing large and continuous streams of our customer feedback—while our team maintains control by adjusting themes, merging themes when appropriate, and adding new ones as they arise. 

Here are a few things we’ve learnt:

1. AI should never be “set it and forget it.” We think of it like our research assistant—an intern that needs to be updated with fresh context, and needs guidance when it starts going down the wrong path. 

2. It’s important to give AI context so it can more intelligently classify and offer more relevant results. With the new option to add theme descriptions, this is easier than ever. 

   

   

3. Auto-populating topics can help us work even faster. Dovetail now auto-populates new channels with predefined topics, based on the data type being integrated. This means that as soon as we create a new channel, we are able to make large data sets instantly relevant. We just need to add some filters, and in minutes we get that quick pulse check on customer sentiment, understand the top five reasons why we win deals, or see the top integration requests for Channels, for example. These are a great first pass at finding common topics to track. Once they’re in, we always like to go in and add more, as well as add topic descriptions to give the AI more context.

To learn more about how we built AI into Channels as well as best practices for using it, check out this blog post. Want to try Channels for your organization? Get started today.