Contacts

Contacts is where you can store, track and manage your contacts and participants. A contact can be linked to raw data and insights created across projects in your workspace, allowing you to trace every interaction with an individual or participant. Contacts are available across your entire workspace and are not specific to a project.

Users with Full access and Can Edit access can add new contacts in the contact database to store and track participants and individuals involved in project work like interviews, surveys, and usability test.

• To create a new person, go to ⚙️ Settings → Contacts and click New.

• From there, enter a name or unique identifier and any important information in fields. Your contact will also be allocated a randomized Dove-atar.

Users can also add multiple contacts at once via CSV import.

• To do this, go to ⚙️ Settings → Contacts and select Import.

• From there, upload your CSV file containing a list of your contacts and map columns to a person’s metadata. You must have at least 1 column mapped to Name to ensure a successful import.

The file should be UTF-8 encoded Comma Separated Value (CSV) file and if importing date information, the format must be in ISO 8601 date format or YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM

You can store metadata on contacts using fields. Fields allow you to segment your participants for search and analysis purposes and commonly capture demographic information (like participant age, location), contact details (like email address or phone number), and other information (like interview date or persona type).

Users with Full access and Can Edit access can create and edit fields on contacts.

• To do this, go to ⚙️ Settings → Contacts and select Fields.

• In the menu, click + New field, enter a field title and select the field type. This field will then appear across all contacts profiles stored in your database.

You can sort and filter your view to segment contacts in your database.

• To do this, open ⚙️ Settings → Contacts, click Filter and apply your filters. You can also filter results by specific contacts or the values you’ve stored in fields.

Contacts can be added to data or insights in projects using fields. This provides traceability of specific research you've done related to a particular person.

• To add a contact to a data object or insight, click + New field and select the field type Contact.

• From there, you can proceed to select contact stored in the contact database as values in the field itself.

You can also link a contact to an interview, call, or meeting by adding them as a speaker in your transcript.

If you're importing contacts, you can choose how you would like to deal with duplicate contacts if found. There are three options, for managing duplicate data:

• Keep both - all imported spreadsheet rows will create new contacts.

• Replace - spreadsheet rows with a duplicate in the contacts database will replace the duplicate.

• Discard - spreadsheet rows with a duplicate in the contacts database will not be imported.

If you select replace or discard duplicates, you must choose which column to use as a unique identifier. A unique column is one in which no two entries are the same (e.g. an email column, or a unique id column). We use this column to search for matches between your CSV and your existing contacts database.

Anyone with full access to the contact database can adjust its access controls from the share menu on the contacts database.

You can assign a different level of access for every user, group or workspace that you share with. This is helpful if:

• You want only a few people to manage access to contacts while everyone can interact with it.

• You want contacts metadata to only be visible to a specific team.

• You want your stakeholders to know the names of speakers, but not let them edit all the metadata.

The four cascading permission levels are Full access, Can edit, Can use, and No access.

Users can download a spreadsheet of stored contacts from the workspace.

• To export your contacts database, navigate to ⚙️ Settings → Contacts database and in the top right corner, select Download CSV.

This spreadsheet will contain a number of columns with field data in a CSV format, and can be opened with Apple Numbers, Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, or other spreadsheet software.

• Audit your workspace: Review which users currently have access to Contacts and adjust as needed.

• Coordinate with CRM owners: If you use Salesforce or another external database, consider syncing contacts and limiting Dovetail access accordingly.

• Train your team: Ensure users understand when and how to assign speakers, and what access they need to do so.

• Use naming conventions: Set standards for contact names to avoid duplicates and improve consistency.