Contacts

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Overview

Contacts is where you can store, track, and manage your contacts and participants. A contact can be linked to raw data and insights created across projects in your workspace, allowing you to trace every interaction with an individual or participant. Contacts are available across your entire workspace and are not specific to a project. Contacts can be added manually, imported via CSV, or created automatically when Dovetail transcribes your video or audio files. See Automatic contact enrichment (Beta) below for more information.

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Add a new contact to your database

Users with edit access can add new contacts to the contacts database to store and track participants and individuals involved in project work, such as interviews, surveys, and usability tests.

• To create a new person, go to ⚙️ Settings → Contacts and click New.
• From there, enter a name or unique identifier and any important information in fields. Your contact will also be allocated a randomized Dove-atar.

These users can also add multiple contacts at once via CSV import.

• To do this, go to ⚙️ Settings → Contacts and select Import.
• From there, upload your CSV file containing a list of your contacts and map columns to a person’s metadata. You must have at least 1 column mapped to Name to ensure a successful import.

The file should be UTF-8 encoded Comma Separated Value (CSV) file and if importing date information, the format must be in ISO 8601 date format or YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.

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Automatic contact enrichment (Beta)

When a video or audio file is uploaded and transcribed, Dovetail can automatically find contact information in the transcript and use it to create new contacts or update existing ones. Dovetail uses a combination of sources to find contact details:

• If your file is imported from Zoom or Microsoft Teams, Dovetail pulls the contact name and email where available.
• For meetings imported automatically via calendar integrations, participant details are pulled from the calendar event.
• All other information, including role, company, or name if not available from the above sources, is inferred by AI directly from the transcript itself.

For example, if a participant mentions their company name or job title during an interview, Dovetail can capture that and add it to their contact record. You can choose how enrichment behaves by selecting one of three modes:

• Auto-create and update – Dovetail creates new contacts and updates existing ones automatically.
• Update existing only – only contacts already in your database are updated. No new contacts are created.
• Off – contact enrichment is disabled entirely.

To configure enrichment, go to ⚙️ Settings → Contacts and select the enrichment mode that suits your workflow. You can also map custom contact fields (like company name, job title, or department) so they are populated automatically when a contact is created or updated. If you haven’t mapped any fields yet, Dovetail will do its best to match the information to the correct fields automatically.

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Add fields to categorize contacts

You can store metadata on contacts using fields. Fields allow you to categorize your participants for search and analysis purposes and commonly capture demographic information (like participant age, location), contact details (like email address or phone number), and other information (like interview date or persona type). Users with edit access can create and edit fields on contacts.

• To do this, go to ⚙️ Settings → Contacts and select Fields.
• In the menu, click + New field, enter a field title and select the field type. This field will then appear across all contacts profiles stored in your database.

Fields can also be populated automatically when contacts are created or updated through contact enrichment. You can configure which fields are mapped in your contact enrichment settings.

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Sort and filter contacts in your database

You can sort and filter your view to segment contacts in your database.

• To do this, open ⚙️ Settings → Contacts, click Filter and apply your filters. You can also filter results by specific contacts or the values you’ve stored in fields.

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Link contacts to data or insights

Contacts can be added to data or insights in projects using fields. This provides traceability of specific research you’ve done related to a particular person.

• To add a contact to a data object or insight, click + New field and select the field type Contact.
• From there, you can proceed to select contact stored in the contact database as values in the field itself.

You can also link a contact to an interview, call, or meeting by adding them as a speaker in your transcript. When a video or audio file is transcribed, Dovetail can also automatically create or update contacts from the transcript. See Automatic contact enrichment above for more information.

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Manage duplicate contacts

If you’re importing contacts, you can choose how you would like to deal with duplicate contacts if found. There are three options, for managing duplicate data:

• Keep both - all imported spreadsheet rows will create new contacts.
• Replace - spreadsheet rows with a duplicate in the contacts database will replace the duplicate.
• Discard - spreadsheet rows with a duplicate in the contacts database will not be imported.

If you select replace or discard duplicates, you must choose which column to use as a unique identifier. A unique column is one in which no two entries are the same (e.g. an email column, or a unique id column). We use this column to search for matches between your CSV and your existing contacts database.

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Restrict access to your contacts database

Anyone with full access to the contact database can adjust its access controls from the share menu on the contacts database. You can assign a different level of access to each user, group, or workspace you share. This is helpful if:

• You want only a few people to manage access to contacts, while everyone can interact with it.
• You want contacts metadata only to be visible to a specific team.
• You want your stakeholders to know the names of speakers, but not let them edit all the metadata.

The four cascading permission levels are Full access, Can edit, Can use, and No access:

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Download contacts data

Managers can download a spreadsheet of stored contacts from the workspace.

• To export your contacts database, navigate to ⚙️ Settings → Contacts database and in the top right corner, select Download CSV.

This spreadsheet will contain a number of columns with field data in a CSV format, and can be opened with Apple Numbers, Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, or other spreadsheet software.