Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.dovetail.com/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Overview
Defining your Channel’s context and topic descriptions enables you to guide Dovetail’s AI to focus on what matters most to you and capture the important topics and themes that your organization wants to track over time.
Defining your Channel’s Context
When adding context to any channel, follow these core principles:
- Focus on 2-3 main goals that apply across all your data
- Keep it under 400 characters and be concise
- Use natural language with clear structure that helps you understand the content in a glance
- Avoid overly detailed specifics to prevent filtering out other valid insights
- Specify your role to direct AI to analyze data from your perspective
Example: 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.
If multiple teams will be utilizing the channel, your context should balance diverse perspectives while maintaining focus. Key Elements to include for this use case:
- Identifies all participating teams
- States shared objectives
- Uses neutral language that serves all teams
- Focuses on outcomes relevant to everyone
Example: This channel serves Product, Design, and Customer Success teams tracking product usability across reviews. Focus on: confusion points in user workflows, feature clarity issues, and actionable improvement suggestions. Highlight patterns affecting user experience and adoption.
Context Strategies to Consider
- Umbrella Approach: Create broad context that encompasses all team needs:
- Use company-wide objectives as the foundation
- Focus on customer experience or business outcomes
- Avoid team-specific jargon or priorities
- Emphasize shared metrics and goals
- Perspective Integration: Explicitly acknowledge different viewpoints
- Outcome-focused context: Center on business results rather than team functions
- Journey-based context: Organize around customer journey stages
Defining Topic Names & Descriptions
While you can utilize the Dovetail generated topics & descriptions, you are always able to adjust the both the topic names and/or the descriptions (or add your own).
Topic Name Best practices
- Use clear wording that immediately conveys the high-level category
- Keep titles concise (2-3 words when possible)
- Use customer language rather than internal jargon
- Avoid overlapping categories that could confuse classification
- Use consistent naming patterns across similar topics
Good Examples:
- “Mobile App Performance”
- “Billing Issues”
- “Feature Requests”
- “Onboarding Confusion”
Bad Examples:
- “Technical probelms with updating the software” (too granular)
- “Issues” (too broad)
- “Stuff about our platform” (unclear)
Topic Description Best Practices
- Explain the theme’s scope clearly in 1-2 sentences
- Use keywords that customers might actually use
- Guide the AI on what to look for and what to exclude
- Keep under 200 characters for optimal performance
- Include specific examples but make sure the example and expectation matches the most common meaning in general English
Examples
Below you will find Context and Topic descriptions examples for six of the most common types of data customers
Context Examples
Customer Experience Manager: I am a Customer Experience Manager analyzing NPS and CSAT responses to understand what drives customer satisfaction and loyalty. Help me identify the key factors that create promoters versus detractors, understand specific touch-points that impact satisfaction scores, and discover actionable insights for improving overall customer experience. Focus on both positive experiences we should amplify and negative experiences we need to address.Product Manager: I am a Product Manager using NPS/CSAT feedback to guide product strategy. I want to understand which product features and experiences most strongly correlate with customer satisfaction. Highlight specific product strengths that drive positive scores and pain points that create detractors. Include any suggestions for product improvements or new features that could increase satisfaction.Multi-team: We are Product, Marketing, and Customer Success teams jointly analyzing customer satisfaction feedback to drive company-wide improvements. We want to understand satisfaction drivers across the entire customer journey, identify both product and service factors that impact scores, and discover insights for improving customer experience, product development, and go-to-market strategies. Focus on actionable insights that can inform product roadmaps, marketing messaging, and customer success programs.Topic Description Examples
| Topic Name | Description |
|---|
| Product Ease of Use | Feedback about how intuitive, simple, or complex customers find the product. Includes comments about user interface clarity, workflow efficiency, and learning curve experiences. |
| Customer Support Quality | Experiences with our support team including response times, helpfulness, knowledge level, and overall satisfaction with support interactions. Covers both positive and negative support experiences. |
| Value for Money | Perceptions about pricing fairness, ROI, cost-benefit analysis, and whether customers feel they’re getting good value. Includes comparisons to competitor pricing and budget concerns. |
| Product Reliability | Comments about system uptime, stability, consistent performance, and trustworthiness. Includes feedback about bugs, crashes, and technical reliability issues. |
| Feature Completeness | Feedback about whether the product meets customer needs, missing functionality, and gaps in capabilities. Includes requests for additional features and comparisons to competitor offerings. |
Context Examples
Mobile Product Manager: I am a Mobile Product Manager analyzing app store reviews to improve our mobile experience. I want to understand user frustrations with app functionality, performance issues, and usability problems. Highlight specific features that users love or hate, technical issues affecting user experience, and suggestions for mobile-specific improvements. Focus on both iOS and Android feedback patterns.Marketing Manager: I am a Marketing Manager reviewing app store feedback to understand our market positioning and user perception. Help me identify what users say about our value proposition, how we compare to competitors mentioned in reviews, and what messaging resonates with different user segments. Include insights about user expectations and how well we meet them.Customer Success: I am a Customer Success professional using app reviews to understand user onboarding and engagement challenges. I want to identify where new users struggle with the app, what causes users to abandon or uninstall, and what drives long-term engagement. Focus on the user journey from download to active usage and retention factors.Topic Description Examples
| Topic Name | Description |
|---|
| App Performance Issues | Reviews mentioning crashes, slow loading, freezing, battery drain, storage usage, or other technical performance problems. Includes both specific error reports and general performance complaints. |
| User Interface Feedback | Comments about app design, navigation, layout, visual appeal, and usability. Includes both positive design praise and suggestions for interface improvements. |
| Feature Functionality | Reviews about specific app features working or not working as expected. Includes feature-specific bugs, missing functionality, and requests for feature improvements. |
| Onboarding Experience | First-time user experiences including app setup, tutorial quality, initial confusion, and ease of getting started. Covers both smooth onboarding experiences and setup difficulties. |
| Update and Version Issues | Problems introduced in new app versions, complaints about forced updates, or positive feedback about improvements in recent releases. Includes version-specific bugs and changes. |
Context Examples
Product Manager: I am a Product Manager reviewing support tickets to prioritize product improvements. Help me identify which product features or workflows generate the most confusion or frustration for users. Highlight specific usability issues, missing functionality, and areas where customers struggle to accomplish their goals. Include any feature requests or suggestions for product enhancements.Support Team: I am a Support Team Lead analyzing ticket patterns to optimize our support processes. I want to understand common customer issues, identify knowledge gaps in our documentation, and find opportunities to improve our response efficiency. Focus on categorizing issues by complexity and identifying trends that could inform our training and resource allocation.Multi-team: We are a cross-functional team (Product, Customer Success, and Support) analyzing support tickets to improve overall customer experience. We want to identify product issues that drive support volume, understand customer success opportunities, and optimize support processes. Focus on categorizing issues by root cause (product, process, or customer education), impact on customer satisfaction, and opportunities for proactive improvement across all team functions.Topic Description Examples
| Topic Name | Description |
|---|
| Authentication Issues | Login problems, password reset failures, two-factor authentication issues, and account lockouts. Includes both technical authentication errors and user confusion about login processes. |
| Integeration Problems | Issues connecting our product with third-party tools, API errors, sync failures, and data import/export problems. Covers both technical integration failures and setup difficulties. |
| Billing Inquiries | Questions about charges, invoice discrepancies, payment method issues, subscription changes, and refund requests. Includes both billing errors and billing process confusion. |
| Feature Not Working | Reports of specific product features that are broken, not responding, or producing unexpected results. Focus on functionality that should work but doesn’t. |
| How-to questions | Requests for help understanding how to use existing features, step-by-step guidance, and clarification about product capabilities. Covers learning and usage questions rather than technical problems. |
Context Examples
UX Research: I am a UX Researcher analyzing product feedback to understand user experience patterns. I want to identify usability issues, workflow frustrations, and areas where users struggle to accomplish their goals. Highlight specific interface problems, confusing interactions, and suggestions for improving user flows. Include both functional issues and emotional responses to the product experience.Product Strategy: I am a Product Strategist using customer feedback to inform long-term product direction. Help me identify emerging user needs, changing usage patterns, and strategic opportunities for product evolution. Focus on broader themes about customer goals, market trends, and potential new product directions rather than specific feature requests.Customer Success: I am a Customer Success Manager reviewing product feedback to improve customer onboarding and adoption. I want to understand where customers get stuck, what features drive the most value, and how to help users achieve success faster. Highlight common learning curves, feature discovery issues, and factors that lead to increased product engagement.Topic Description Examples
| Topic Name | Description |
|---|
| Feature Requests | Suggestions for new functionality, enhancements to existing features, and requests for product capabilities. Focus on primary product features. |
| Workflow Improvements | Suggestions for streamlining processes, reducing steps, improving efficiency, and enhancing user workflows. Includes feedback about task completion and process optimization. |
| User Experience Suggestions | Ideas for improving interface design, navigation, information architecture, and overall user experience. Covers usability improvements and design enhancement suggestions. |
| Integration Requests | Requests for connections with specific third-party tools, API improvements, and expanded integration capabilities. Includes both new integration requests and improvements to existing ones. |
| Documentaton and help | Feedback about help documentation, tutorials, onboarding materials, and learning resources. Includes requests for better explanations and more comprehensive guidance. |
Context Examples
Sales Manager: I am a Retention Manager analyzing churn feedback to reduce customer attrition. I want to understand the primary reasons customers leave, identify early warning signs of churn risk, and discover opportunities for intervention. Focus on categorizing churn reasons by type (product, service, price, etc.) and understanding what could have prevented each departure.Product Manager: I am a Product Manager reviewing churn reasons to identify product-related retention issues. Help me understand which product limitations or missing features drive cancellations, what competitive alternatives customers choose, and how product experience contributes to churn decisions. Include insights about product-market fit and feature gaps that impact retention.Customer Success Leadership: I am a Customer Success Leader analyzing cancellation feedback to improve our customer journey. I want to understand failure points in onboarding, ongoing support, and value realization that lead to churn. Focus on identifying systemic issues in our customer success processes and opportunities to better demonstrate ongoing value to customers.Topic Description Examples
| Topic Name | Description |
|---|
| Product Limitations | Cancellations due to missing features, functionality gaps, or product capabilities that don’t meet customer needs. Includes comparisons to competitors with better feature sets. |
| Pricing Concerns | Cancellations related to cost, budget changes, pricing increases, or perception that the product is too expensive for the value provided. Includes price sensitivity feedback. |
| Technical Issues | Departures due to ongoing bugs, performance problems, reliability issues, or technical difficulties that couldn’t be resolved. Includes frustration with product stability. |
| Service Quality Issues | Cancellations due to poor customer support, account management problems, or negative service experiences. Includes dissatisfaction with company responsiveness or helpfulness. |
| Business Changes | Departures due to company restructuring, budget cuts, changing business needs, or strategic shifts that make the product no longer relevant. Includes organizational change. |
Context Examples
Product Manager: I am a Product Manager analyzing product reviews to guide feature development and positioning. I want to understand what customers value most about our product, identify common complaints or limitations, and discover unmet needs that could inform our roadmap. Highlight specific use cases, integration needs, and competitive comparisons mentioned by users.Marketing Manager: I am a Marketing Manager reviewing product feedback to refine our positioning and messaging. Help me understand what benefits customers highlight, what language they use to describe our value, and how they compare us to alternatives. Include insights about different customer segments, use cases, and the specific outcomes customers achieve with our product.Multi-team: We are Product and Marketing teams collaborating to analyze product reviews for both development and positioning insights. We want to understand what customers value most about our product, identify improvement opportunities, and discover messaging that resonates with different customer segments. Focus on feature feedback, competitive positioning, customer language for marketing, and product enhancement opportunities.Topic Description Examples
| Topic Name | Description |
|---|
| Product Quality | Assessments of build quality, durability, materials, craftsmanship, or software robustness. Includes both positive quality praise and concerns about product construction or reliability |
| Delivery and Shipping | Experiences with order fulfillment, shipping speed, packaging quality, delivery accuracy, and logistics. Covers both positive delivery experiences and shipping problems. |
| Customer Service Experience | Interactions with sales, support, or service teams including responsiveness, helpfulness, knowledge, and problem resolution. Includes both pre and post-purchase service experiences. |
| Competitive Comparisons | Direct comparisons to competitor products, mentions of alternatives considered, and relative positioning feedback. Includes reasons for choosing this product over others or vice versa. |
| Use Case and Applications | How customers actually use the product, specific use cases, workflow integration, and practical applications. Includes both intended and creative uses of the product. |