Raw survey data, typically exported as a CSV, is a flat wall of text and numbers. It’s difficult to see the complete story of a single respondent because their answers are scattered across dozens of columns. Analyzing the rich, open-ended text responses alongside quantitative data is clunky and disconnected. Surveys are a powerful tool for gathering valuable feedback from your customers, users, and stakeholders for projects that capture important information of a specific moment in time. In this lesson, you will learn how work hand-in-hand with AI to centralize, analyze, and capture a holistic view of responses to customer survey.

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Create a channel and import survey responses

Projects helps an unreadable spreadsheet into an organized collection of human-centric documents. It preserves the integrity of each individual’s feedback, allowing you to understand their full context. This structured format is not only easier for you to read but is also essential for enabling Dovetail’s AI to accurately analyze and summarize the results. Importing a CSV file into a project works different to other files. When importing a CSV of survey data, Dovetail will automatically detect the file type and map a row to a single page. Typically, a row represents a single participant’s complete survey, structured to include all questions and answers to them.
  • To import a CSV of survey data, click Import and select your file.
  • Next, you will need to map columns from your spreadsheet to how it will be presented on a single page. We recommended selecting the participant ID or name as Title and the remaining as Content.
  • Once you’ve completed mapping columns, preview how the final import will look like for each completed survey and press Confirm. This will start creating new data objects in your project for each completed survey.
Dovetail’s CSV importer intelligently transforms each row of your spreadsheet into a separate, structured document. This brings all of one person’s answers together in a clean, question-and-answer format in blocks. These question blocks not only provide a consistent structure across all surveys completed by participants, but they also contribute to the creation of a magic insight that summarizes your survey results.

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Understand survey results across all responses

Analyzing hundreds or thousands of open-ended survey responses is a classic research bottleneck. Manually reading, coding, and finding themes in free-text fields can take days or even weeks. This valuable qualitative data is often the hardest to unlock at scale. Dovetail’s AI insight automatically reads and synthesizes the answers to every question across all respondents of your survey. It generates a summary of themes for each open-ended question and provides a clear overview of quantitative results. You don’t have to wait to start finding themes as seconds after your survey data is imported, Dovetail automatically creates an AI insight for your project. This insight contains AI-generated summaries for every question across all completed surveys, giving you an instant overview of your findings. Each question and related responses are summarized within their own answer blocks throughout the document.

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Layering in hands-on analysis

An aggregated insight is great for understanding overall trends, but it can obscure the powerful stories of individuals. A single, well-articulated quote from a frustrated user or an enthusiastic power user can often be more persuasive to stakeholders than a high-level percentage. Dovetail allows you to seamlessly switch between the macro view (the project-wide AI insight) and the micro view (individual responses). You can drill down into the feedback from a specific user, explore nuances and use highlights to elevate their most compelling quotes.

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Dive deep into each participants’ responses

Each participant’s survey responses are imported into a project as a single object. That means you can familiarize yourself with the data, compare indiviudal responses, and read through the full responses to get a feel for the nuances. Within each participant’s completed survey, there are AI-generated summaries for your open-ended questions. To gain a new perspective, you can refine this summary using AI summaries. Select from different prompts to tailor the output, such as:
  • Summary: Get a high-level list of the most important points.
  • Topics: Understand the recurring topics from the conversation.

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Uncover key moments with highlights

As you read through a survey, use your cursor to select your “golden moments”—the most insightful, impactful, and representative quotes from your customers. These are your highlights. Creating a highlight pulls that piece of evidence out so you can start building the evidence base you’ll need to create compelling, data-backed insights for your stakeholders.
  • To create a highlight, select a section of text in a note and select Highlight from the action menu.
If you’re a power user, you can quickly create highlights by selecting a section of text and then pressing Tab on your keyboard to cycle through the action menu.
This hybrid approach combines the power of scale with the power of storytelling. The AI summary gives you the quantitative “what,” while deep dives and highlights uncover the qualitative “why.” By creating highlights, you build an evidence base of powerful, verbatim quotes that can be used to create impactful, persuasive reports that move your stakeholders to action.
Survey results are no longer just a static spreadsheet to be charted; they are a rich, explorable collection of customer stories and data waiting to be understood. Your next step is to create a project to import your first survey CSV, let AI generate your initial insights, and start uncovering the stories behind the numbers to build data-backed narratives that drive action.Create a new project →