Channels

​

Overview

Turn all your customer feedback into real-time insights with channels. Uncover trends and build products people love. Bring your support tickets, product reviews, and continuous feedback into one place and let Dovetail make sense of it.

---

​

How Channels work

Channels continuously classifies and tracks themes in large data sets. This is done by connecting to your feedback sources with direct integrations to keep your finger on the pulse of high-volume customer feedback and gain real-time insights. Channels is powered by generative AI. We build upon established technology from Anthropic, ensuring reliability and privacy, and utilize specific models to manage large data sets efficiently without training on your sensitive data. Themes are generated from the individual data points imported into a channel. A data point is a single piece of feedback that is imported to a channel in Dovetail. It could be a support ticket, an NPS response, or any kind of continuous product feedback. A theme is a collection of data points with a title. All Professional and Enterprise workspaces can import up to 250 data points per month and purchase additional data points by navigating to Settings → Billing.

---

​

Create a new channel

Managers and Contributors can create a new channel sidebar under Home or Browse pages. You can create a channel to track themes in support tickets, CSAT/NPS responses, churn responses, app store reviews, and in-product reviews.

• To do this, click New and select Channel.
• From there, import data via an available first-party integration, Zapier, or API. These options will automatically sync data into your channel. You can also import a CSV manually.

---

​

Add context to guide AI

In a channel, Dovetail generates high-level topics to organize and refine key themes from your data. You can enhance AI-driven topic generation by adding context. When creating a new channel, you will be instructed to provide details such as your role, specific goals, or key focus areas to create dynamic, tailored topics that align with what you’re interested in.

• To do this, in the textbox under Context enter your details as a prompt. For better results, you can also refine your prompt using Enhance context.
• Next, our AI will surface a list of auto-generated topics and descriptions based on your imported data and context. You can choose to keep, remove, or add your own topics.
• From there, confirm the topics for your channel and select Finish.

You can update or edit context anytime within a channel. Simply open the channel, click ••• in the top-right corner, and select Context. Enter your details as a prompt, hit Save, and let the AI generate topics that focus on what truly matters to you. Updating this will only affect future classification.

---

​

Create a topic, category, or area of interest

You can also add your own custom category, topic, or area of interest to organize themes and track what’s important to you. For a Channel, you can create up to ten topics in total that can be updated at any time.

• To do this, select + New in the sidebar.
• Next, add a title and a brief description to help guide how we generate themes and classify data points.
• From there, click Create. Once created, we will create new themes and classify any existing and new data points into these.

You can also remove a topic from your channel if it is no longer needed. When removed, this will also remove any themes created within it. Data points classified under these themes will remain in your Channel.

• To delete a topic from your Channel, hover over your topic in the sidebar, click ••• then select Move to trash.

---

​

Merge, edit, and create themes

You’re always in control of your data. Once themes have been generated, you can merge any that are overlapping, edit to refine the title, or create your own if something was missed!

​

Merge themes

• To merge themes, simply select multiple themes and press Merge from the top of the theme table.

​

Edit themes

• To edit a theme, select the … menu next to the theme name and, select Edit. You will see a dialogue box where you can change the theme title and description. Press Save when done.

​

Create a theme

• To create new themes and keep track of what’s relevant to you, click + New in the sidebar or on the themes list.
• From there, enter the theme name and description to help guide data classification and theme detection.

---

​

Create a weekly digest of Channels data

Get an automated digest of what’s new, what’s trending, or what issues are spiking in your channels each week. Every Friday, the weekly digest provides a summary of the past week’s most important activity, including high-impact themes, emerging patterns, and anomalies. You can view the summary in-product, or have it delivered to you via email or Slack.

​

What’s in the digest?

The digest is designed to surface the most important changes in your data from the last seven days.

​

Emerging themes

Emerging themes highlight themes with the most significant change in activity compared to the previous week. This helps you spot sudden shifts in feedback, regardless of whether a theme is new or well-established. A theme is considered ‘emerging’ if it experiences a sudden increase or a sharp decrease in new data points.

• For example, a theme that jumps from 1 to 100 data points is emerging.
• Likewise, a theme that drops from 100 to 1 data point is also emerging, as both represent a significant change.

​

How to get your weekly digest

To get started, first make sure you are following the Channel you’d like a weekly digest of. If you are the creator of a Channel, you automatically follow it. If not, you can follow a Channel by navigating to Settings → Notifications. Your digests will be delivered based on your existing product notifications preferences found in Settings → Notifications. You can view the digest in Dovetail at any time by clicking the ••• menu in the channel’s top-right corner and selecting Activity.

---

​

Manage data sources for a channel

You can add new data sources within a channel at any time.

​

Add an additional data source

• To add an additional data source to a channel, open your channel and click on Source in the top right of the screen.
• From there, you will be able to see which sources are connected to your channel as well as connect a new source. Select Add source and complete steps to connect a new integration or import a CSV spreadsheet of new data to your channel.

---

​

Track usage across channels

Channels is billed by the total number of data points used in all channels across a single workspace. To help you keep on top of your team’s usage, you can quickly review how much data has been used for an entire workspace.

• To do this, open Settings, select Billing and navigate to Add ons.
• From there, you will be able to see Channels and review the usage period dates alongside the number of data points used for that period.

For a specific channels, you can also get a quick view of your usage by clicking on Sources in the top right corner of your channel. Admins can purchase a Channels add-on to increase the monthly limit for Channels across a workspace. For more information, see our article here.

---

​

FAQs