Mable built a single source of truth for customer knowledge with Dovetail

At Mable, they’re bringing people together to enable unique and inclusive lifestyles. Their platform helps connect people with disability and older Australians with independent Support Workers who operate as small businesses. UX and research sit under Customer Experience at the company, which represents the voice of the customer. As a cross-functional team it's crucial they’re always conducting research to put the people first, understand how best to support them, and communicate this to product. The team focuses on qualitative research and insights to deliver excellent experiences through design.

Consolidate data, standardize process, unify tools

Before establishing their Customer Experience team in 2020, Mable conducted only a small amount of customer research and information was stored across various storage solutions rather than a single place. When the CX Team formed, their research tooling, similar to many other start-ups, was fragmented across different platforms. Insights and knowledge were trapped in isolated documents and siloed in specific teams or individuals. A lot of manual work was needed to search for and locate data across different projects and documents. This process couldn’t to scale, especially to support growth ambitions at Mable.

Dovetail was introduced at Mable as a single repository for all research notes, transcripts, customer interviews, synthesis, and insights. Data is more organized, faster to find, and easier to share. Locating and extracting past interviews, insights, and key quotes allowed the team to build on customer knowledge instead of repeating research. With everything in one tool, they can structure and streamline the process to save time. Dovetail templates and tags have helped the team standardize flows for different research types.

Sharing powerful insights to influence stakeholders and drive user-centered design

In the past, it was difficult for the Mable team to extract quotes or data to share while still having it link back to themes or transcripts. Communicating insights to stakeholders and other departments wasn’t as efficient or impactful as they needed.

Now with Dovetail, the team can create more influence and affect stakeholders with powerful highlight reels and insights reports. Consolidated findings and themes can be traced back to granular bits of data—interviews, video clips, and quotes—which are shared out as Dovetail links. Then, anyone who wants to can deep dive into the full session notes or audio recordings. This helps drive customer empathy inside and outside the CX team and fosters a culture of user-centered decision-making.

With the help of a centralized research repository, the business has developed a culture of referring to customer insights to find answers and explanations. Mable no longer focuses solely on quantitative measures but also on understanding the whys. One clear shift has seen the CX team now often receiving requests to provide insights or conduct research on initiatives rather than needing to convince teams to run research.

Analysis that connects the dots and empowers different ways of working

When research was spread across different tools and physical mediums, it was challenging to tie everything together and form a holistic picture. Teams were quantitative data-focused and reacted to metric fluctuations without a deep understanding of the insights behind the data. Many experiments or features were executed based on assumptions rather than customer insights.

When the Dovetail repository started to be used, learnings were pulled from multiple research projects, past and present, to provide multi-faceted insights. Now, new initiatives marry qualitative with quantitative to drive forward product decisions. When teams hold different views around product or performance, Dovetail helps them discover insights that point to the root problems and disprove false assumptions.

Dovetail’s canvas view allows different ways of mapping and grouping data into themes. The tool’s flexibility has encouraged synthesizing to fit multiple research methods, which has been extremely powerful for the team.