One of Asia Pacific’s most recognized airlines connects tens of millions of passengers to destinations across the globe every year. Its group spans multiple airline brands and one of the region’s most established loyalty programs, serving customers at every stage of their journey—from planning and booking to lounge access and points redemption. Dedicated CX researchers, UX teams, and service designers run ongoing customer studies across the airline, digital, and loyalty divisions.

Customer experience had been elevated as a board-level strategic priority, signaling something the research team had long known: customer intelligence couldn’t stay confined to a single function. The challenge was organizational, not methodological.

That gap is what led the group to Dovetail. Adoption started with the CX research team and spread through internal referral across brands and divisions until product managers were requesting access without being pushed and senior leaders were reviewing research directly. Today, a second airline brand is joining the workspace. This is how they got there.

The research itself wasn’t the problem. CX teams were running continuous customer studies. UX researchers were conducting usability testing on the airline’s mobile app and digital products. A researcher on the digital payments product was importing internal documents, synthesizing them through chat, and building outputs to share with senior stakeholders—working largely in isolation, because no infrastructure existed to make that work visible to the rest of the organization.

“I’ve got 10,000 slides just on our research reports,” the Head of Design observed—“impossible to learn from.” The result was duplicated effort and blocked decisions. Product managers made calls without direct access to customer evidence. Leadership asked the same question in every meeting: where does the data live, and is it safe? After high-profile data incidents across the industry, strict data governance requirements—including PII redaction protocols—were a condition of getting any centralized research tool approved for use across the group.

Customer knowledge generated across the group’s brands and divisions couldn’t be searched, cross-referenced, or built upon. The group was still, as its Head of Customer Research put it, “in the crawl phase”—generating research without the infrastructure to make it compound.

The infrastructure came first. A core group of researchers built the foundational structure: a global tag taxonomy aligned to phases of the customer journey, sentiment analysis tags, and division-specific tags for airline and loyalty research. Templates followed for common study types—customer interviews, usability testing, unmoderated research, and continuous discovery—so new teams could start with consistent structure rather than a blank slate.

The group then held a full-day, face-to-face workshop to bring researchers, UX designers, service designers, and product managers together on the platform for the first time. The session covered onboarding, PII redaction workflows (a legal and compliance requirement), AI-powered suggested highlights and tags, and Chat for cross-project querying. The event marked a turning point: Dovetail wasn’t just a research tool. It was becoming the group’s customer intelligence platform.

AI features accelerated the shift. The team found that Dovetail’s suggested highlights and automatic tagging—when paired with well-defined tag descriptions—accurately identified relevant verbatims without requiring manual review of every transcript. Synthesis quality sharpened as Dovetail’s AI models matured. A researcher described finding the verbatim identification “really accurate” and built the approach into the team’s operational playbook.

“We’re able to bring customer intelligence to decision-makers and product leaders quickly, and share it across our design community.”

— Loyalty CX Lead

The group’s largest study in Dovetail ran end to end in three weeks: 300 customer interviews, every transcript processed, every insight tagged, and the findings searchable across the organization before the formal report existed.

For a research team that had previously measured synthesis time in months, that shift was pivotal. Dovetail didn’t just shorten the time from research to reporting. It changed when customer intelligence became useful, and who could use it.

Product managers from the airline’s app team, loyalty divisions, and digital products are now requesting access to Dovetail—not because researchers pushed the platform onto them, but because they saw the value and came looking. At the same time, four major research programs were running end to end in Dovetail, spanning digital products, loyalty experience, and additional lines of business.

That momentum is now extending beyond the first airline. A second airline brand within the group is joining the same workspace, bringing its research alongside data from across the group in a single, searchable platform. For the first time, customer intelligence can be shared across every brand.

“As a global airline, we have customers all around the world. We need to bring global intelligence to the table and stay right on top of customer trends,” says the Loyalty CX Lead.

That intelligence is also reaching the people who make decisions. Senior leaders now receive Dovetail outputs directly, instead of relying on secondhand summaries in presentation decks. As more teams and brands contribute to the same workspace, the value of that shared intelligence continues to grow.

What began as a faster way to synthesize research is becoming a shared intelligence layer for the group: one place where customer knowledge can move across teams, brands, and decisions.