Zapier is on a mission to make automation work for everyone. Founded in 2011, they built a platform that helps teams connect the tools they rely on daily, like Salesforce, Google, Dropbox, and Intuit, so data moves automatically and work stays in motion. What started as a clever integration layer has grown into an automation platform used by organizations of every size to remove the friction from how work gets done.

That obsession with eliminating friction naturally extended to how Zapier understands its customers. Head of UX Research Roy Olende leads a team responsible for ensuring customer intelligence flows through Zapier as reliably as the integrations they build for everyone else. Keeping a fully remote organization at this scale oriented around the customer is a real challenge. The tools they had weren’t helping.

Hundreds of hours of customer evidence sat scattered across multiple platforms, organized by whoever ran the study and rarely findable afterward. Teams knew insights existed somewhere. Getting to them was another matter.

For a company built around connectivity, Zapier’s customer intelligence was fragmented. Research sat in different systems, organized by the team that produced it. Useful in the moment, increasingly hard to reach as the org grew. Finding older data had become a real problem, one that directly undercut Zapier’s ability to make fast, evidence-backed product decisions.

Dovetail changed that. The team assembled hundreds of hours of customer evidence into one centralized system: searchable, organized, and accessible regardless of when or where the research was created. Evidence from months or years prior didn’t have to be reconstructed from scratch. It could be found, resurfaced, and built on.

“Dovetail helps us simplify the process of pouring all our customer data and all our insights into one spot.”

— Roy Olende, Head of UX Research, Zapier

Zapier’s culture runs on curiosity, but curiosity isn’t easy to scale across a fully distributed team. Dovetail gave Zapier’s teams a systematic way to keep customer feedback visible, accessible, and connected to day-to-day decisions. It changed who could use customer intelligence, and when.

That access shows up in everyday ways across the organization. Senior leaders use highlight reels to absorb customer feedback in context.

Product managers and executives can go directly to the data rather than waiting for findings to be handed over. New hires encounter real product feedback in their first week. Wherever someone sits in the org, they have access to the same shared source of customer intelligence.

For Roy and his team, the most concrete measure of impact is time. Centralizing customer intelligence in Dovetail saves Zapier tens of hours every week. Those hours previously went toward hunting for data, de-duplicating research efforts, or rebuilding context that already existed somewhere else in the org.

That time now goes into faster learning and better decisions. Mental load decreases when the information teams need isn’t buried across a dozen platforms. Research accelerates when teams don’t have to start from zero. Decisions come more quickly when anyone can pull up customer feedback in context rather than waiting for synthesis.

When customer intelligence is accessible to everyone, from new starters to senior executives, the whole organization stays closer to the customer by default. Roy’s team doesn’t need to be in every room to bring the customer into it. The data’s already at their fingertips, in Dovetail.