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The workspace contacts database listing participants and customers
Available on Legacy and Enterprise plans.Managers and Contributors can create and edit contacts. On plans without user roles, any user can.

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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 docs 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, Zapier, or the API, created automatically when Dovetail transcribes your video or audio files, or created from your sources’ data. See Speaker identification for transcripts, and Create contacts from source data for sources. If your workspace connects Salesforce or HubSpot, Dovetail also adds details from your CRM to contacts that already exist.

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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 contact, click the Main Menu, navigate to ••• More, click Contacts. From there, click + Add and select Create new contact
  • From there, enter a name or unique identifier and any important information in fields.
Creating a new contact and viewing its fields on the Contacts page
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 one column mapped to Name to ensure a successful import.
The file should be a 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.
Each contacts CSV import supports up to 500 rows.The contacts database supports up to 50,000 contacts.

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Speaker identification

When a video or audio file is uploaded and transcribed in a project, Dovetail can automatically find contact information in the transcript and use it to create new contacts or update existing ones. Speaker identification applies to transcripts in projects only. It doesn’t apply to data in Channels. Dovetail looks for contact details in these places:
  • 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 it isn’t available from the above, 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. Dovetail links each speaker to an existing contact by email address where one is available, and otherwise by name. It writes the email, role, and company it finds to the Email, Role, and Company default contact fields, filling in only fields that are empty. Workspace admins choose how speaker identification behaves:
  1. Go to Settings → Data management → Transcription.
  2. Next to Speaker identification, select one of these options:
    • On: link speakers to contacts, and create contacts that don’t exist yet.
    • Update only: link speakers to existing contacts only. No new contacts are created.
    • Off: don’t identify speakers.

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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.
To delete a contact field, open a contact card, select the field you want to delete, and click Move to trash. Default contact fields can’t be deleted.
Some fields are also filled in automatically, for example by speaker identification or a CRM sync. See Default contact fields.

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Default contact fields

Every workspace has five default contact fields. Each one has a fixed meaning, so the features that create, match, and enrich contacts use these fields even after you rename them. Default fields show a Default badge in the contacts table and in a contact’s fields. Dovetail uses the default fields in these ways: You can rename a default field, and it keeps its meaning. You can’t delete one. If you move all contacts to trash, the default fields are kept. In a workspace that existed before default fields, Dovetail turns the fields your workspace already used for these details into default fields, and they keep their names, such as Job title. Dovetail adds any default fields that are missing.

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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.
Filtering the contacts table by the values of a field
Contacts can be added to data or docs 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 doc, 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 Speaker identification.
An interview transcript with its speaker’s linked contact in the sidebar

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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, for example 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

Only available on our Enterprise plan
Users always inherit their highest assigned access levelA user’s access to contacts is always determined by their highest assigned permission. To restrict them, you must first lower the workspace’s permission level, then grant higher access back to other users individually.
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:
Access to the contact database has recently changed. Here is everything you need to know:
  • For any new workspaces created after July 2nd, 2025:
    • By default, everyone in the workspace has full access.
  • For workspaces created before July 2nd, 2025:
  • Existing permissions have been carried over, so you shouldn’t notice any changes.
    Here’s how old permissions map to the new system:
  • Admins at the time of the implementation were granted Full access.
  • Admins added after July 2, 2025, will need to be granted Full access. To receive Full access, you’ll need to navigate to the “Share” button on the top right on the Contacts page and reach out to a user with Full access to grant you Full access.
  • Other roles that previously had access now have Can edit permissions: they can create, edit, link, and comment on contacts, but can’t manage access levels.
  • If a role didn’t have access before, it still doesn’t.

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Download contacts data

Managers can download a spreadsheet of stored contacts from the workspace. 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.
Downloading the contacts table as a CSV file

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