Voice of customer

A voice-of-customer (VoC) program collects customer feedback from every channel it arrives on and analyzes it in one place, so support, sales, research, and product work from the same view rather than each assembling their own. This page covers setting one up in Dovetail. Sources route into a single pipeline and are analyzed consistently, producing a ranked list in which each item records the accounts affected and the revenue they represent. Prioritization can then be based on revenue and account reach rather than request volume alone.

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Stage 1: Centralize the feedback

Connect the sources where customers already talk to you: support tools, review sites, surveys, product analytics, and sales calls. Anything without an integration arrives by CSV, the Dovetail API, or Zapier. Teams keep working in their existing tools, and Dovetail receives a copy of the feedback.

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Decide what each channel is for

Do this before you connect anything. Combine sources when they support the same team, need the same context, and cover the same product area. Split them when they don’t, and use metadata and segment filters when one source spans several regions. A noisy source mix makes it hard to tell whether a pattern is real or an artifact of what you happened to connect. 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.

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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.

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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.

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Connect your CRM

Idea rollups show ARR, plan tier, and account only if your Contacts database is connected to your CRM. Without it, ideas are ranked by volume alone.

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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.

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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 answers point-in-time questions, and every answer carries citations, so anyone can check a claim against its source. Dashboards show whether a measure is improving or declining over time. For teams who work in Slack or Microsoft Teams, Chat in Slack and Teams returns the same answers without opening Dovetail.

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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.

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Where to go next