Channels

Turn all your customer feedback into real-time insights with channels. Uncover trends and build products people love. Bring your support tickets, product reviews, and continuous feedback into one place and let Dovetail make sense of it.

Using LLM and ML techniques, channels continuously classifies and tracks themes in large data sets, connecting to your feedback channels with direct integrations to keep your finger on the pulse of high-volume customer feedback.

These themes are generated from the individual data points imported into a channel. A data point is a single piece of feedback that is imported to a channel in Dovetail. It could be a support ticket, an NPS response, or a row within a spreadsheet.

All Professional and Enterprise workspaces can import up to 250 data points per month and purchase additional data points by navigating to Settings → Billing.

Managers and Contributors can create a new channel from Home or Browse pages.

• To do this, click New → Channel.

• From there, configure your channel by selecting what data type best matches your feedback. We recommend setting up separate channels for each data type as the prompts we are giving the LLM are different and specific.

Once your channel is created, it's time to start bringing in your data points. At this time, you can connect directly to Front, Intercom, Jira Service Management, and Zendesk, and we'll begin syncing your tickets in real time. You can also import feedback through Zapier, or our Public API

• To connect a new data source, open a channel, press + Add source, and select from the list of data sources.

• Once your data source has been connected, select the data you wish to sync to your channel. You can choose specific teams or inboxes and the timeframe of your data. The timeframe you select is how far back you want to start syncing data from your source.

For example, if you select from 6 months, all existing data collected from the last 6 months will be added to your channel as a starting point. From there, any new data collected will be automatically synced into your channel over time.

You can also import NPS responses, support tickets, churn responses, and app reviews from a CSV spreadsheet. We recommend tidying up your spreadsheet first before importing into a channel including renaming important headings, identifying what column you wish to have analyzed and removing any data that you do not wish to import into Dovetail. Any dates must also be in ISO 8601 date format or YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.

• To connect a new data source, open a channel, press + Add source, and select from the list of data sources.

• Once your CSV has been selected, you will need to map the data how the data should be analyzed and organized once imported. To ensure the right data is analyzed:

  • Choose a column that has content you want analyzed. This is typically a comment or ticket.

  • Choose a column as date

• If you have additional columns in your spreadsheet, you can bring these into your channel as data fields that you can filter and segment themes by. These are typically metadata fields that contain demographic information.

• After selecting your fields to filter by, select Finish. Your channel will then start identifying themes and classifying your data points into these themes.

You're always in control of your data. Once themes have been generated, you can merge any that are overlapping, split any that need to be more granular, or even create your own if you think something was missed!

Merge themes

• To merge themes, simply select multiple themes and press Merge from the top of the theme table.

Split themes

• To split themes, select a theme and click on Split from the top of the theme, above the summary.

Create themes

• To create new themes, hit the + button at the top of the theme table and enter the theme name you'd like to start tracking!

You can add new data sources from a channels at any time.

Add an additional data source

• To add an additional data source to a channel, open your channel and click on Source in the top right of the screen.

• From there, you will be able to see which sources are connected to your channel as well as connect a new source. Select Add source and complete steps to connect a new integration or import a CSV spreadsheet of new data to your channel.

Channels is billed by the total number of data points used in all channels across a single workspace. To help you keep on top of your team's usage, you can quickly review how much data has been used for an entire workspace.

• To do this, open Settings, select Billing and navigate to Add ons.

• From there, you will be able to see Channels and review the usage period dates alongside the number of data points used for that period.

Admins can purchase a Channels add-on to increase the monthly limit for Channels across a workspace. For more information, see our article here.

What counts towards Channels usage for our plan?

A single data point imported into a Channel contributes to usage. For example, a single conversation imported from Zendesk or Intercom counts as a single data point. Total usage is aggregated across all channels in your workspace. By default, workspaces on the Professional and Enterprise plans have 250 data points per month included in their plan for dedicated use in Channels.

The usage period resets every month from the workspace billing date. This is applicable for plans billed on both a monthly and yearly billing cycle.

What happens when I hit the data points limit for the month?

Once you reach the usage limit for the month, no new data points will appear in your channel. You can continue to access all data that has been imported previously, move data points, and update the themes list.

This also means that there will be no extra charges for overages and if necessary, you can choose to upgrade your data usage for your plan.

The usage period resets every month from the workspace original billing date. This is applicable for subscriptions billed on both a monthly and yearly cycle.

Can I increase or decrease how many data points included in my plan?

Yes! If you have purchased a Channels add-on, a workspace admin can upgrade to increase or downgrade to decrease the number of data points you wish to have analyzed per month. For more information, see our article here.

There are a few important things you will need to know before upgrading or downgrading your Channels add-on:

• If you upgrade in the current billing cycle, the new limit will apply immediately, and data points in the current cycle will be imported and analysed in Channels (up to the new limit).

• If you upgrade in the next billing cycle, only the data points that come in during the new cycle will appear in Channels. You will lose the data points from the previous cycle that were not imported.

• When downgrading and decreasing your limit, the new limit will apply immediately and no new data will appear in Channels. Any historical data will still be available.

Can I export data from Channels?

No, you cannot export data from a channel like regular project data. This includes imported data points, generated themes, or generated summaries.

How is our data being used?

For details on your data, see Responsible Use on Dovetail AI features.

Are there new policy checks required to use Channels?

The current Artificial intelligence development policy in our trust center is still relevant and covers what is required to use channels.