Dovetail helps RigUp put customer research in every team’s hands

RigUp serves the energy industry through three lines of business: workforce management, which staffs oil and gas projects; vendor management, which tracks compliance for on-site vendors; and engineering and capital services, which delivers projects end to end and manages their cost.

Each arm serves different personas with different workflows, so what works for one customer can create friction for another.

Lizz Cuzzacrea, Director of Research, joined RigUp six years ago as its first dedicated research hire and grew the function into a full team. For much of that time, findings lived across Google Drive, Notion, and Smartsheet, and synthesizing a single study took days or weeks.

“A lot of it was just in my head. Completely fragmented.”

Lizz CuzzacreaDirector of Research, RigUp

RigUp evaluated all three tools as a home for its research. Each was good at organizing files, but none could triangulate findings across studies or turn them into shareable insights.

In an industry that runs on relationships and trust, building the wrong thing wastes time and erodes credibility with customers. Several teams are having conversations with customers every week and without a shared place to bring those conversations together, insights easily get lost.

RigUp was looking for a tool that could manage knowledge rather than just organize it, one that could analyze studies, triangulate findings, and turn them into insights. Dovetail met that bar.

A full report built on six user interviews used to take more than two weeks. With research now in a single home, it takes 48–72 hours. Lizz describes the difference as “wildly more efficient,” and the small research team has kept pace even with half its previous capacity.

User interviews are the team’s primary research method, from quick 15-minute calls to hour-long sessions, and every one goes into Dovetail to be transcribed, highlighted, and tagged. Dovetail’s built-in video transcription removes a manual step from every study before that analysis begins.

For sharing across teams, Lizz opens Dovetail during meetings to answer questions from sales and GTM teams live, rather than taking those questions away and coming back with answers days later.

With every piece of evidence in one workspace, the team can also trace how the industry has shifted over time. This is all made possible with everyone working from a single, evidence-backed source of truth.

Before an external meeting, RigUp’s CTO had a question about customers. He typed directly into Dovetail Chat, which answers natural-language questions with citations back to the source, and found exactly what he needed without going through the research team.

“He Slacked me not to ask a question, just to tell me he got the answer, and it was great.”

Lizz CuzzacreaDirector of Research, RigUp

Engineers took the same route ahead of RigUp’s hackathon, spending the preceding weeks reading research and customer feedback in Dovetail to shape their projects. One proposal opened with a finding straight from the platform: “I’ve got a hackathon idea which I pulled out of Dovetail.”

Another engineer reviewed the team’s research and developed an idea before asking whether it was worth pursuing. With engineers able to consistently find and use the material themselves, the small research team is saved a large chunk of repetitive and time-consuming work.

Taking it further, RigUp uses Channels for continuous analysis of incoming customer feedback, with AI-generated themes that connect sales data to research and back. When interviews showed that customers struggle to reach the decision-maker, Channels backed the finding with two themes found from the team’s Salesforce notes:

• Decision-maker access barriers slowing sales cycles (78 pieces of evidence)
• Navigating cross-departmental expansion (58 pieces of evidence)

Previously, sales could only back a research finding with “we’ve heard that before.” Now everyone across the organization has visible evidence of how many times an issue has been raised, and which customers have raised it.

60% of RigUp engages with Dovetail, and up to 65–75% among senior and executive leaders. Product managers and designers use it daily, while engineering, operations, and leadership turn to it when a question comes up in an internal meeting or when they’re preparing for an external one.

Every week the research team sends Wednesday Insight Nuggets (WINs), a digest built from Dovetail that brings customer learnings and industry trends to finance, engineering, and supply chain teams. This means even people who never open the workspace have visibility over key customer insights.

As more of RigUp’s product team takes ownership of evidence-based decisions, Dovetail keeps teams from asking the same questions twice, duplicating research, or making roadmap decisions without the context of what RigUp has already learned from their customers.

“As our teams and industry evolves and priorities shift, we really can’t afford to lose what we’ve already learned.”

For Lizz, that is what separates Dovetail from the tools that came before it. While Google Drive, Notion, and Smartsheet held RigUp’s research, Dovetail brings evidence-backed context, and a deeper understanding of their customers that’s continuously accessible to the whole organization.

“It’s like a living, breathing thing that is getting better with all of us. It’s your research partner, not just a tool.”