How we use Ask Dovetail

In 2024 we unveiled Ask Dovetail—a solution that brings the voice of the customer to life directly where teams are talking every day. 

We recently announced that Ask Dovetail, along with being available in Slack, is now also available in Microsoft Teams. Ask Dovetail allows you to have a conversation with your insights hub directly in Microsoft Teams and Slack. Got a question you need answered? Ask away and you’ll get a summarized response based on every customer interaction your organization has had—sales calls, app reviews, feedback surveys and more.

Getting close to customers isn’t just what we preach here at Dovetail, it’s what we practice. One of our core values is put the customer first—and it’s a guiding light for how we work and make decisions. Ask Dovetail is a product that emerged from our commitment to this value. It was built to help our customers get closer to their customers and as a byproduct, we use it to stay close to our customers.

Fun fact: Ask Dovetail originated as an idea from our biannual hackathon, Make It. It was quickly brought to life and now we, like our customers, get loads of value out of it.

So how does Ask Dovetail help teams stay close to customers?

• Search summaries: Get answers to your burning customer questions without leaving Microsoft Teams or Slack. Search summaries use a combined keyword and semantic search algorithm that aims to understand and respond to queries just like a human would. Designed to help you build trust in the AI providing them, summaries come with citations, complete with links to the relevant data point in Dovetail.

• Conversational chat: Chat with Dovetail to gain the context you need. Dive deep into customer questions and receive answers based on all of your customer interactions. Keep the conversation flowing by asking follow-up questions, exploring deeper insights and context.

• Digests: Create recurring audio or text digests from common queries to keep your team in the loop with the latest insights. Audio digests are like receiving a weekly podcast on the customer knowledge you need to know, straight to Slack or Teams.

Every day at Dovetail, we use our own product to better understand our customers and to build customer empathy across every team. Ask Dovetail helps us by bringing the customer’s voice to where our internal conversations happen. Here are some ways that we use Ask Dovetail to bring the voice of our customers into every conversation. 

We ask questions and empower everyone to build knowledge

Getting answers to customer questions starts with asking the right questions. The questions we ask Dovetail range from gathering customer sentiment, like “How do our [industry vertical] customers feel about [product]?”, to more specific queries such as “What is [customer] saying about the recent updates to [feature]?”

Follow up questions let us really dig into the details we are looking for: “What are they trying to achieve with [product]?” or “What issues are they experiencing with [feature]?”.

Living by our values here at Dovetail—another one of them being transparent by default—we ask Dovetail questions in public channels. This approach helps us to keep aligned on customer needs across every team and function. Regardless of whether a query is made by a designer, engineer, or marketer, everyone has access to view the response, and even ask follow up questions. This level of transparency helps us learn together.

Additionally, the citations on Ask Dovetail responses offer a great way to bring everyone back into our Dovetail workspace to do even more discovery or gain further context.

We set up regular digests to keep everyone in the loop

Ask Dovetail lets you create recurring text or audio digests from common queries to keep your team updated with the latest insights. We have over 20 digests being published to our discussion channels on a weekly basis. And now that we can set up digests to follow a relevant search, we’re using it to maintain a continuous understanding of our customers.

We set up regular digests to automatically update our team on information related to product feedback, sales call updates, churn reasons, and more. These queries dive into key insights from recent customer feedback, focusing on both the strengths and areas for improvement in our product.

In addition to giving us a quick summary that helps us detect customer sentiment, with audio digests, Ask Dovetail incorporates audio snippets from customer calls that are relevant to what we’re trying to learn. We find these super useful as we’re able to anchor insights in what customers are saying—in their own words.

Our leadership team loves these digests. In fact, they are the ones who have set up most of them. At Dovetail, we have found that they help everyone to feel closer to our customers. They ignite conversations within and across teams, enable us to address customer issues quickly, and they even contribute to shaping our product roadmap.

Ask Dovetail is designed to embed customer knowledge into every decision, faster. Your team moves fast, and switching back and forth between tools can slow you down. With Ask Dovetail, you can keep your team aligned, decide faster on what to focus on next, and keep the customer front and center, without leaving your team discussions. 

And with the Ask Dovetail AI assistant in Slack, Ask Dovetail not only brings the voice of the customer to team conversations from your insights hub, but from team conversations within Slack as well. Get the context you need, without needing to search through reams of conversation threads.

Discover more about Ask Dovetail or speak to our sales team to request a demo