Dovetail’s VoC workflow is built on Channels. If you’re setting one up for the first time, read Channels 2.0 first — it’s the model this page assumes.
New to Dovetail? Create a workspace at dovetail.com/signup, then come back to this guide. If your company already uses Dovetail, ask a colleague to invite you instead.
Stage 1: Centralize the feedback
Start with the tools where customers already talk to you: support tools, review sites, surveys, product analytics, and sales calls. Workspace admins create sources for these tools once for the whole workspace, and each channel adds the datasets it needs, such as a Zendesk group or a Qualtrics survey. Teams keep working in their existing tools, and Dovetail imports a copy of the feedback. Each source processes its data as it’s imported, so a new channel starts from feedback that’s already in Dovetail and ready to analyze. See How data gets from a source to a channel. For a tool without an integration, send its data to an API source or a Zapier source, or upload a CSV to a channel as a one-off import. If your workspace doesn’t have a source you need, request one.Sources
What sources are, who sets them up, and how channels use their data.
Decide what each channel is for
Do this before you create sources and channels. Combine sources in one channel when they support the same team, need the same context, and cover the same product area. Split them into separate channels when they don’t. When one source spans several regions or products, add only the datasets that belong in each channel, such as the Zendesk groups for one region. Choosing datasets is how you narrow what a channel analyzes. A noisy source mix makes it hard to tell whether a pattern is real or an artifact of what you happened to add. Deeper research — interviews, usability tests, sales calls you want to analyze closely — belongs in Projects rather than a channel. Both feed the same workspace, so Chat and Agents reason across them together.Stage 2: Make sense of it
At real volume, nobody can read the raw feedback. Channels 2.0 groups it into ranked Ideas, each backed by the Evidence behind it. Ranking weighs your business context, how often something comes up, how many accounts are affected, and how much ARR sits behind it. Every idea rolls up the data points, sources, contacts, and ARR behind it. That roll-up is what makes an idea defensible in a planning review. Each item names the accounts it affects and the revenue they represent, and you can open its Evidence to read the original tickets and quotes.Give the channel context
Focus areas and linked workspace docs shape which ideas surface. Keep context to two or three goals, in plain language — adoption, usability, and reliability for a product team; recurring friction and satisfaction drivers for support.Connect your CRM
Idea roll-ups show the companies and revenue behind each idea only when the contacts linked to its evidence have company and revenue details. These details usually come from your CRM, through a customer context source (CRM enrichment): Salesforce Contacts or HubSpot Contacts. See Contact details and revenue in Channels.Review as you go
Come back as volume grows. Check that your context still matches your goals, and merge overlapping ideas — slow load times and timeouts usually belong in one.Stage 3: Give teams direct access
A program that depends on one person to produce a monthly report creates a bottleneck. Anyone should be able to get an answer without asking that person first.Chat
Cited answers to plain-language questions across projects, channels, and docs.
Dashboards
NPS, CSAT, sentiment, and keyword trends over time, with Chat on the data behind them.
Stage 4: Act, and close the loop
Analysis and reporting can both be complete without any change reaching the product. This stage covers turning ideas into work. Send an idea to Jira or Linear and the ticket stays linked to the feedback that prompted it, so you can trace a complaint through to the change that shipped. Configure an Agent to handle the recurring reporting — a weekly channel summary posted to Slack, an emerging-issue alert, or an escalation by email, so stakeholders receive it on schedule without anyone writing it. Use Docs and its Voice of Customer framework for writing that needs to persist, like quarterly reviews. Then tell customers what changed. When you move an idea to Resolved,Notify customers drafts a personalized update to the contacts whose feedback drove it.
One person usually owns this work: keeping context current, tidying ideas, and confirming that resolved ideas are communicated back. The program produces a ranked list in which every item names its accounts and revenue, a record linking feedback to the work that shipped, and a recurring digest stakeholders receive without asking for it.
Where to go next
Channels 2.0
Ideas, Evidence, context, and closing the loop.
Contacts and revenue
How ideas show the customers and revenue behind them, from source data and your CRM.
Digital Twins
Pressure-test a decision against what a segment has actually said.
Integrations
Every tool you can create a source for, grouped by category.