Support tickets are a real-time goldmine of customer feedback. However, for product, design, and VoC teams, this data is often an overwhelming and inaccessible firehose. Manually sifting through thousands of tickets to find meaningful patterns is impossible. With Channels, you can transform this reactive stream of support tickets into a proactive, automated source of insight. Channels keep your finger on the pulse of customer feedback, helping you monitor post-launch sentiment, track emerging issues, and understand key trends without manual effort. In this lesson, we will cover the essential steps to turn your support queue into a strategic asset.

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Create a channel and connect your tools

For product, design, and VoC teams, customer feedback from support tickets is often trapped, invisible, and inaccessible. You rely on second-hand information from support agents or periodic manual reports, which means you’re always looking in the rearview mirror instead of seeing what’s happening now. Channels create a direct, automated pipeline from your support tools into a dedicated, collaborative space. The first step is to create a direct pipeline from the tools where your customers are talking to a centralized space for analysis in Dovetail. Managers and Contributors can create a new channel and sync ticket data from your existing tool stack. Dovetail currently supports leading platforms like Front, Intercom, Jira Service Management, Zendesk, and Freshdesk. At larger organizations, its common you may need admin access to these tools to set up these integrations. We recommend working with your internal IT team to understand what integrations you will need to configure, share relevant help documentation and have them partner with you when setting up in Channels. Once you have permission to connect your ticketing tool, it’s time to get started creating your channel in Dovetail.
  • To do this, click New and select Channel.
  • Next, connect your support tool, select what inboxes to pull data from, and historical data you want to analyze in your channel.

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Let our AI know what’s important to you

A product manager tracking bugs, a designer investigating usability, and a VoC professional monitoring billing issues all need different insights from the same data. A generic analysis is irrelevant noise to almost everyone. The key is to teach Dovetail’s AI to act as your personal analyst, surfacing the themes that are most relevant to your team’s specific goals. You do this by providing clear context when you set up your channel. When creating a new channel, you will be prompted to provide details about your role, goals, or key focus areas. This context guides the AI to create dynamic, tailored topics that align with what you’re interested in. When adding context to a channel:

Keep it concise

  • Highlight your top 2–3 goals

Use natural language

  • As if you were briefing a human analyst or intern

Keep it broad

  • Enough to discover related themes
A good example of this looks like:

I am a Product Manager interested in feedback related to product intuitiveness in these product reviews. Highlight points where users felt confused, lost, or unsure how to proceed. Include any suggestions for improving clarity, flow, or ease of use.
This makes the analysis instantly relevant and actionable. Instead of you having to search for signals, the Channel acts as a personalized filter on the feedback firehose. It automatically triages and categorizes feedback, allowing you to spend less time digging and more time acting on the insights that matter most to your role.
How do you spot a small bug before it becomes a major outage? How do you justify dedicating design resources to fix a “minor” usability issue? A single ticket is an anecdote, but a hundred tickets about the same problem is a data-driven trend that’s impossible to ignore and even harder to quantify manually. Once your channel is running, Dovetail gets to work identifying and tracking themes in your data. It provides a bird’s-eye view of your customers by making sense of support tickets, product reviews, or NPS responses over time. Channels automatically quantify your qualitative feedback. It groups tickets into themes and visualizes their volume over time, turning the “what” into “how many” and “how often.” Here’s how it’s structured:
  • Topics: High-level categories, guided by your initial context prompt, that organize your themes (e.g., “Usability Issues”).
  • Themes: Dovetail’s AI automatically groups similar data points into a theme (e.g., “Users are confused by the pricing page”). A theme is a collection of related feedback with a clear title and summary that you can read to quickly gauge feedback.
  • Data points: A single piece of imported feedback, like a support ticket conversation. Data points help you understand which conversations have contributed to that conclusion.
It transforms anecdotes into actionable evidence:
  • For Product Managers: A spike in a theme’s volume is a clear, early warning signal of a bug or post-launch issue, allowing you to react quickly and prioritize your backlog with confidence.
  • For Designers: Seeing a consistent, high-volume theme around “UI confusion” provides the quantitative evidence needed to justify prioritizing a redesign.
  • For VoC Professionals: The trend charts provide the clear, compelling data needed to report on the top customer issues and their impact to leadership.
Support tickets are no longer just a queue to be managed; they are a rich, real-time source of insight waiting to be unlocked. Your next step is to create your first channel, connect your support platform, and start turning customer conversations into your strategic advantage. Create a new channel →