How Dentrix Makes Customer-Centric Product Decisions at Scale

Dentrix, a Henry Schein company, is the leading practice management solution in the dental space. Today, more than 35 thousand dental practices are using Dentrix to run every aspect of their dental practices from accounting to scheduling, and patient charting to insurance claims.

Dentrix got its start 25 years ago, partnering early on with Microsoft to work with the first versions of Windows. Since then, Dentrix has driven the market from an innovation standpoint and continues to strive to remain a leader in the space as the market matures. Listening to users and understanding their ever-evolving needs helps drive their continued success.

To better listen to their customers, UserVoice plays a key role helping the product team at Dentrix understand what their customers are asking for, quantify the customer impact of every customer request, and make strategic decisions about what to build.

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Understanding Customer Requests at Scale

The product team at Dentrix leverages a combination of feedback methods including customer interviews, surveys, focus groups, and their Dentrix User Group to gather product insight from their end users, but like many other organizations, the team has found scaling up their feedback efforts challenging.

“We have limited resources so it’s important that we are trying to do the things that will be most impactful within a given timeframe to meet company expectations.”

“There are lots of ways to get product feedback, but there’s also a lot of customers to get feedback from,” says Brad Royer, Senior Product Manager at Dentrix. He estimates Dentrix has upwards of 600,000 end users, which represent only a portion of the people the product team needs to hear from, “We also have internal customers such as support, sales, and external trainers whose needs must be represented as well,” he says.

UserVoice helps the team capture and consolidate feedback from all of the various sources it comes from at scale. “With UserVoice we can get all of those people together in a single community and let people vote on what they feel is most important. And for us, that’s a great way of acting as the first gate in deciding what we do,” Royer explains.

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Making Strategic Product Decisions

When it comes time to prioritize roadmap initiatives, Dentrix has a Product Core Team consisting of a group of product managers and an advisory board of representatives from other parts of the organization such as support, operations, and marketing, who work together to drive product strategy. UserVoice feedback fuels early discussions on what features get looked at further to be pursued for the product by helping them identify which customers are asking for specific product enhancement ideas so they can assess the urgency and priority for each request. One of the key metrics the team looks at during this phase in their development process is customer impact, and UserVoice data enables them to easily quantify this by looking at the number of customers who have requested or supported a specific idea in UserVoice.

As important initiatives begin bubbling to the top, the product team uses UserVoice data to help weigh the business impact of requested features and functions against a variety of metrics tied to company goals, such as improving loyalty or reducing churn.

This in-depth assessment is key to making sure resources are properly allocated, “We have limited resources so it’s important that we are trying to do the things that will be most impactful within a given timeframe to meet company expectations,” says Royer.

In the future, look to the team at Dentrix who plans to incorporate even more customer data into their planning and strategy process, including customer spend and NPS to help them better prioritize lists of requests.