Dovetail

What is Dovetail

Dovetail is a customer insights hub designed for teams to store, analyze, and collaborate on user research data. Its main purpose is to help businesses understand their customers better by turning raw data like interviews, feedback, and surveys into clear, actionable insights. The platform uses artificial intelligence to speed up the analysis process, such as transcribing audio and video, summarizing long texts, and identifying key themes. Dovetail was founded in 2017 by Benjamin Humphrey and Bradley Ayers. The company is based in Sydney, Australia, and serves organizations worldwide, helping them build a central repository for all customer knowledge.

Dovetail Features

• Projects: This is the core workspace where you organize your research. You can import data from many sources, including documents, call transcripts, and survey responses. The AI features help to automatically analyze this data and create reports quickly.
• Ask Dovetail: This feature lets you ask questions about your research data in plain language, like using a search engine. It integrates with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, so team members can get answers without leaving their chat applications.
• Channels: AI automatically organizes continuous feedback from sources like support tickets, app reviews, and NPS scores. It helps you track trends and alerts you to important issues as they appear.
• Recruit: A feature to find and manage participants for your research studies. You can recruit from a large pool of consumers and professionals and keep all your contacts in one place.
• Data Centralization: Dovetail acts as a single source of truth for all customer feedback. This prevents insights from being lost in different documents or presentations.
• AI-Powered Analysis: The platform includes powerful AI tools. It can generate automatic summaries of interviews, suggest themes from your data, and help you find patterns much faster than manual methods.
• Collaboration Tools: Teams can work together inside Dovetail. You can comment on data, share insights, and create reports to share with stakeholders.

Dovetail Pricing Plans

Dovetail offers several pricing plans to fit different team sizes and needs. There is typically a plan for individuals or small teams just starting with research, which includes basic features for analysis and collaboration. A more advanced plan is designed for growing teams that need more capacity, more integrations, and enhanced security features. For large organizations, there is an enterprise plan that provides advanced security, dedicated support, and scalable solutions to build a customer-centric culture across the entire company.

Dovetail Free Plan

Dovetail offers a free plan that is suitable for individuals or small projects. This plan usually includes a limited number of projects, transcriptions, and data storage. It allows users to experience the core features of the platform, such as tagging and basic analysis, without any cost. For those who need more features or have larger data volumes, Dovetail also provides a free trial of its paid plans, allowing teams to test the full capabilities before committing to a subscription.

How to use Dovetail

To start using Dovetail, you first need to sign up for an account. Once you are in, you create a new Project for your research study. Next, you import your data. This can be video files from user interviews, audio recordings, survey results from a CSV file, or simple notes. Dovetail's AI will automatically transcribe any audio or video. As you review your data, you can highlight important quotes and apply tags to them. Tags help you categorize information. After tagging, you can group related tags into themes or insights. This process, often called affinity mapping, helps you see the bigger picture. Finally, you can create an Insight report that summarizes your findings, includes key evidence like quotes and video clips, and can be shared with your team and stakeholders.

Pros and Cons of Dovetail

Pros:

• Centralized Repository: Keeps all research data and insights in one organized place.
• Powerful AI Features: Automatic transcription and AI summaries save a lot of time in analysis.
• Excellent for Qualitative Data: It is very effective for analyzing interviews, usability tests, and open-ended feedback.
• Collaboration: Makes it easy for team members to work together on research projects.
• Great Sharing Capabilities: You can create and share professional-looking reports and video reels easily.

Cons:

• Learning Curve: New users may need some time to understand all the features and best practices.
• Pricing: The cost can be high for larger teams, making it a significant investment.
• Quantitative Analysis is Limited: The tool is focused on qualitative data and is not a replacement for statistical analysis tools.

Dovetail integrations

Dovetail connects with many popular tools to create a smooth workflow for your team. These integrations help bring customer feedback from different sources into one central place.

• Zoom integration: Automatically import your cloud recordings from Zoom for transcription and analysis.
• Slack and Microsoft Teams integration: Share insights and get notifications directly in your team's communication channels.
• Zapier integration: Connect Dovetail to thousands of other apps to automate tasks, like creating a new Dovetail note from a Typeform entry.
• Jira integration: Link customer insights and feedback directly to development tasks and tickets in Jira.
• Google Drive integration: Import documents and files from Google Drive into your Dovetail projects.

Dovetail Alternatives

• UserTesting: A platform that focuses more on participant recruitment and video-based feedback. It is a good alternative if you need to conduct remote usability tests and get quick feedback from a target audience.
• Maze: A tool for rapid, unmoderated testing of prototypes and live websites. It is stronger for quantitative usability metrics, while Dovetail is stronger for qualitative data analysis.
• Condens: A direct competitor that also offers a research repository with tagging and analysis features. Some users find its interface simpler, but Dovetail often has more powerful AI capabilities.
• EnjoyHQ: Another research repository platform that centralizes customer feedback from various sources. It is known for its powerful search and data management features, making it a strong alternative for large organizations.

Dovetail API

Dovetail provides a public API that allows developers to build custom integrations and automate workflows. You can use the API to programmatically manage projects, import data, and export insights. To get an API key, you typically need to go to your account settings within the Dovetail application, where you can generate a personal access token. This token is used to authenticate your API requests.

Here is a simple example of how to use the API with curl to list your projects:

curl --request GET \
     --url https://api.dovetailapp.com/v1/projects \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
     --header 'accept: application/json'

Replace YOUR_API_KEY with your personal access token.

Dovetail Affiliate program

Dovetail does not have a publicly advertised affiliate program with standard commission rates. They focus more on direct sales and organic growth. However, if you are an influencer, a consultant, or run a business that complements Dovetail, you can contact their partnerships or support team. They may be open to discussing custom partnership opportunities or collaborations.