CUSTOMER / A GLOBAL PROFESSIONAL POWER-TOOL MANUFACTURER
How a power-tool leader made years of field research searchable across its product organization
For years, understanding customers was largely the research team’s responsibility, while other teams worked from summaries and secondhand notes. Today, hundreds of people across research, design, product, and engineering can search years of field research themselves, bringing customer intelligence directly into product decisions.
40,000+
customer highlights captured, tagged, and searchable
11,000+
field-research videos centralized for easy viewing
285+
people across research, design, product, and engineering working in Dovetail
The best never guess
Discover how Dovetail can help your team turn customer feedback into decisions.
Customer understanding built on the jobsite
On scaffolding, in trenches, and across factory floors, professionals reach for this company’s tools. It’s one of the world’s largest manufacturers of professional power tools for the trades, and its products are judged every day by the electricians, plumbers, and contractors who depend on them.
Understanding those users requires researchers to go where the work happens. They ride along to jobsites, observe tradespeople using tools in real conditions, and record moments that an interview or survey might never uncover.
The resulting intelligence is rich and highly observational. It’s also difficult to store, search, and reuse at scale.
For years, much of that knowledge remained with the researchers who gathered it. Designers, product managers, and engineers relied on summaries and memory to understand what customers needed. Getting evidence into the hands of the people building the products was slower than it needed to be.
The challenge: rich field research that was difficult to reuse
Customer knowledge was scattered across the tools used to collect and analyze it. Field videos lived on SD cards and shared drives. Debrief notes sat in personal files. Analysis moved between transcription tools, spreadsheets, and whiteboards, forcing researchers to re-enter the same quotes and tags as work passed from one platform to another.
The friction extended beyond the research team. A product manager who wanted to know how electricians responded to a prototype had no reliable way to find the answer without tracking down the researcher who ran the study. Designers and engineers waited for summaries. Evidence that had been carefully captured still reached the wider business slowly, often secondhand.
The company’s scale compounded the problem. Research took place across multiple business units, from power tools and hand tools to accessories, and across design research, UX, and a growing group of product managers. Each function worked a little differently, with no shared foundation for storing and accessing what they learned.
The solution: from scattered evidence to answers in seconds
The team started by bringing every customer conversation into one place, with accurate transcripts as the common foundation. Researchers could tag or annotate each one and jump straight to the video behind it, and the same setup held across functions.
That consistency did more than tidy the team’s own work. It created a searchable body of customer intelligence others could draw on, and for the first time it let researchers ask a question across years of field research at once.
Chat became the fastest way in. Rather than watching recordings again or rereading transcripts to find what users said about a topic, researchers can ask a question directly and receive a cited answer drawn from the underlying evidence.
The value compounds across projects. Because each study lives in the same workspace, work completed months earlier for one purpose can help answer a new question without collecting another interview.
The team increasingly uses natural-language querying. In a single month, they used Chat more than 400 times to pull source-backed answers about their customers.
The payoff: building on shared customer intelligence
As Dovetail became easier to search, access expanded beyond the research team.
Some product managers now upload their own field videos and search customer conversations themselves. For many, simply having searchable transcripts of those conversations was a significant change.
Engineers have also begun bringing the videos, highlights, and tags captured by researchers into their own work, sharing customer evidence directly with the teams they build alongside.
Today, more than 285 people across research, design, digital product, and engineering work in Dovetail. The platform gives each function a shared place to contribute customer knowledge, revisit previous studies, and trace decisions back to firsthand evidence.
For a company operating at this scale in a hands-on, physical industry, that shift matters. Customer intelligence no longer remains with the people who gathered it. It’s become a shared resource that teams across the product organization can search, contribute to, and build on.
The best [] never guess
Discover how Dovetail can help your team turn customer feedback into decisions.
