How did you come up with the idea for Dovetail?
It all started back in 2015 when I was working with a researcher on a diary study project which involved a unique and truly time-consuming data analysis process. Participants were asked to write journal entries regularly before everything was then manually mapped onto a whiteboard. But while the diary study took two weeks, the process around representing and analysing data took three months. I thought to myself, there has got to be a better and faster way of collecting, storing, accessing and using customer research, and I recognised that there was a huge gap in good software for researchers.
How has Dovetail evolved over the last couple of years?
The first version of our product was an email and SMS surveying tool where you would set up a schedule with your research participants. After that, we pivoted to create a new version of Dovetail to transform raw data into insights. Anyone, including researchers, designers, product managers, support people, and marketers, use it. We currently have 4,000 paying customers and more than 50,000 users around the globe from companies like Canva, Royal Bank of Scotland, Atlassian, Warner Music Group, Deloitte and more.
Ultimately, our objective is for businesses to bring their customers into every decision – we want businesses to find out what makes their customers tick with the research, monitor changing consumer behaviour through insights and for this to be shared with the entire business so we can then meet consumer needs.
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What can we hope to see from Dovetail in the future?
Currently, we’re testing more AI-powered features to help users get deep customer insights in record time, whilst placing emphasis on data safety. With features helping speed up the low-risk, manual, and time-consuming steps in the research process.
Our mission is to improve the quality of everything with a vision to utilise AI to transform how companies utilise feedback. In the future, AI will automatically summarise raw data and group by key themes, speeding up the research process, and completely changing how feedback is accessed.
