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Dovetail

Score8.6 out of 10

102 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Dovetail?

Dovetail, headquartered in Sydney, aims to enable the world to create better products and services through deep customer understanding. Dovetail states they empower 45,000+ people, from agencies to universities to Fortune 100 companies, to make sense of their customer research in one collaborative research platform.

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Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of an automate workflow with AI: Agents track every customer signal and act on what’s important before they turn into problems.
Screenshot of an example of an automated transcript with structured note-taking that anchors insights in the voice of the customer. This uses AI-powered Chat and Search to offer instant answers grounded in data—whether it is in Dovetail, Slack, or Teams.
Screenshot of the AI Dashboards that help spot risks before they escalate, act on new opportunities.
Screenshot of the dashboard to connect Dovetail to an existing tech stack, including Slack, Linear, and various meeting recording tools.
Screenshot of where to automatically clustering customer issues into prioritized themes and trends. Useful for surfacing actionable product opportunities from high-volume ticket data.
Screenshot of real-time dashboards that aggregate sentiment, NPS, and app reviews into a unified view of the customer experience.

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Screenshot of an automate workflow with AI: Agents track every customer signal and act on what’s important before they turn into problems.

Who Buys & Uses Dovetail

Dovetail Reviews

What users are saying about Dovetail.
View all Dovetail reviews

Pros

  • Centralized repository for qualitative and quantitative research
  • Advanced AI transcription and summarization features
  • Robust tagging and highlighting functionalities for data organization

Cons

  • Inconsistent precision and utility of AI features beyond transcription
  • Deficiencies in onboarding and training resources for new users
  • Limited support and tools for quantitative research analysis

Useful AI interface should reverse the IA overhaul.

Incentivized
Luke oconnorView profile
Senior UX Researcher in Research & Development at Conde Nast (1001-5000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The single most useful improvement has been the AI chat interface, which reliably references the raw data. While the overhaul has led to confusing navigation and feels less intuitive than before, the ability to extract high-level insights at a glance proves very useful for a small team such as ours that runs at a high pace. I will note, though, there are contextual issues where the chat interface will misconstrue feedback, but this represents general AI limitations for analysis. Lastly, for visual concepts, the addition of Alloy has proved useful for bringing insights to life and framing them in a more visually engaging way for stakeholders to consume output in a different medium.

Pros

  • AI chat interface.
  • Alloys 'prototyping' feature.
  • Referencing the raw data.

Cons

  • As mentioned up top, the contextual errors that occur in AI analysis.
  • Your IA and discovery routes were better before; this overhaul was unnecessarily complex and frustrating to navigate.
  • I find assigning names clunky. Batch uploading data, or even agentic API plugins for drive or user testing, would make this more seamless.

Return on Investment

  • Time saved on producing high level insights.
  • Facilitated democratizing UXR insights.
  • Helps other teams with decision making.

Usability

Other Software Used

UserTesting, Typeform, Hotjar

Remove silos and speed up qualitative analysis.

Incentivized
Marlana A. Coignet, MSView profile
Staff User Researcher in Product Management at Shopmonkey (51-200 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a solo researcher at our startup, we use Dovetail to store all of our customer research. Before Dovetail, all research was stored on my Google Drive or in a shared drive, which made it a very manual process to look up past research. Implementing Dovetail allowed us to store all user research in a central location that anyone in the company could access. The search allows cross-functional teams to easily see what data we have from our customers on any subject. It has removed the silo that used to be a barrier to customer insights. Our biggest use case of Dovetail is the repository and search. The AI is getting a lot better, but still has some ways to go.

Pros

  • Dovetails search is amazing! It allows our teams to jump into Dovetail, ask questions of ALL the data we have there, and provide amazing summaries. This is really great for getting a high-level overview of a particular subject matter. It also provides links to transcripts that verify the summary's source.
  • Speaking of summaries, the AI's summary of a question is amazing. Again, it highlights parts of the transcription that validate the summary. This is an awesome tool for high-level summaries of any research question.
  • I love the tagging for research analysis. The tags are project-specific, so not across your entire data set, but still incredibly helpful. I can review calls and transcripts, highlight and tag any text relevant to the research questions I'm trying to answer. And look through all data for a specific tag, and much more easily spot trends or patterns. This is my bread and butter as a researcher with Dovetail.
  • Lastly, I love the collaborative aspect. Anyone in our organization can log in to Dovetail and review data. I will often share clips directly from Dovetail with stakeholders, who can easily view them. Overall, the collaborative effort has been a huge help in getting more team members into Dovetail.

Cons

  • I think one of Dovetail's biggest challenges is discoverability. They are constantly shipping new features and adding more functionality, but I find the help articles and videos do not go deep enough or even provide enough help to get started. I'm sure I'm not utilizing the platform to its full potential, and I think better training or onboarding across all tiers would help us get more out of Dovetail. Its hard to even know what you're not using or what you don't know.
  • On the Enterprise plan, you get a dedicated account manager who can handle your onboarding. That's the only plan with an account manager. And it's a little unfortunate. When you write into the help center, they direct you to a help article, which again does not go deep enough. I wish there were more opportunities for training and enablement for lower tiers.
  • I think Dovetail is amazing for qualitative research, but I find it very frustrating and lacking for quantitative research. I don't think it makes survey analysis very easy. I would be looking for something closer to a Sheets or Excel for quant analysis, but Dovetail is pretty crude in what it allows you to do with survey results.

Return on Investment

  • The first biggest ROI is the time savings. As a research team of one, there is only so much that I can do with my bandwidth. Dovetail allows me to close out research projects much faster than doing it manually. I can upload video interviews, highlight and tag parts of the transcript that relate to research questions, and easily summarize. Highlighting allows me to get the perfect soundbite for a research readout, and overall, Dovetail has helped me move faster and with greater accuracy.
  • Another huge ROI for us is the improved productivity. Product managers, designers, and other colleagues can easily go into Dovetail and ask the chat/search for answers to questions they are trying to figure out. All of this without having to reach out to me, the solo researcher. This saves me a ton of time in Slack messages and meetings.
  • The value of the repository itself is huge. Since all of our research is stored in Dovetail, we can easily search previous research to ensure we are not duplicating efforts or even missing key customer information that may have come up in a separate study. This gives our research a longer shelf life, making it even more valuable.
  • .

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Marvin

Other Software Used

Slack, Anthropic Claude

Dovetail as a organisation wide repository

Incentivized
Harshal Mandhare
Experience Designer 2 in Research & Development at SWIIND (1-10 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I work for a client who is a medtech company and my job is to design the sales workflow for custom implant and their supporting products. This workflow is complicated and very technical. There are user preferences which we need to be aware of while designing, as its a highly specialised product it requires us as designers to understand the needs from clinicians to docuemtn it well and reffer the details in future whenever required. as our client works in a non linear format. the information which we are collecting might be useful later in future. and as we have a big team of designers working across multiple products. it might not be possible for all designers and business stakeholder to be on call. So Dovetail helps us share insights inshort. we are also urging business stakeholders to use Dovetail while talking to customers as this helps us create a repository which can define our entire journey. we have also been using Dovetail to onboard new employees as a lot of the knowledge is documented there.

Pros

  • Knowledge trasnfer
  • Repository of information for future use.
  • Formulation of insights
  • Quoting and reffering to insights and sharing it.

Cons

  • Dovetail can improve in terms of navigation of interview there are a few bugs over there.
  • and product onboarding can be better, as when I started it was hard to use and understand.
  • There are different ways of doing reserach but it would be good if you could define the best practice while using Dovetail.

Return on Investment

  • The presenetation and data which we bring to the table have become more trust worthy as we are not just talking. we can share the exact link to the person saying and quoting it.
  • It has also become easier to navigate to data using AI chat.
  • Sometimes its hard to trust the AI chat fully, even tho it has been accurate most of the times.

Usability

Other Software Used

Figma, Miro

Anyone looking at insights should use Dovetail

Incentivized
Paloma HABABOUView profile
Senior Creative Lead in Research & Development at Venture Studio (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used Dovetail on multiple 'discovery' projects to store, analyse and review hundreds of qualitative interviews as well as quantitative surveys.

It's saved us time for transcript, storing and analysis. No note taking is needed! And you can quickly find and understand key painpoints

Pros

  • Insights summary
  • Tags suggestions
  • Overall storing and organizing

Cons

  • It would be great if Dovetail also handled lookback features (recording + link)
  • would love a tag cleaner where if you spot tags that are similar u suggest merging

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Lookback

Other Software Used

Whereby

Great tool for establishing and scaling research practice.

Incentivized
Helen HendriksonView profile
UX Ops & Qualitative Researcher in Product Management at Uberall (201-500 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We don't have an Enterprise account, and I am the sole researcher who uses Dovetail most often in our company. I am analysing and coding data, synthesising insights, and generating executive study reports. I am focused on qualitative data analysis.

Pros

  • Enabling data coding.
  • Insights template.
  • Data analysis formats (Canva, table, board etc.) capabilities.

Cons

  • AI summaries.
  • Agent emails.
  • Canva data analysis capabilities.

Return on Investment

  • Improved productivity.
  • Source of truth for customer knowledge.
  • Risk reduction.
  • Faster decision making.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Condens

Other Software Used

Userlytics, User Interviews

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