On a Tuesday afternoon, the office manager of a family orthodontic practice sits down with a cup of coffee and something she’s never done before: she reads every review the practice has received this year, start to finish, in one sitting.
She expected to learn about the treatment. Instead, she keeps seeing the same few things. Parents mention that the front desk remembered their kid’s name. They mention that someone called the evening after braces went on to ask how their child was feeling. Teenagers mention, in their own way, that nobody made them feel embarrassed. A few mention the wait. Almost nobody mentions the technology the practice spent so much time choosing.
By the end of the afternoon, she has a page of notes and a different picture of what families actually value. That’s what this post is about: using the information a business already has to understand what people appreciate, so it can do more of it, thank the right people for it, and fix what’s getting in the way.
This piece follows an invented family orthodontic practice. The practice, its team, and its patients are illustrative, not a client story, and nothing here describes a real result. Nothing here is legal advice either. Health care businesses have specific privacy rules, and any practice should check with its own compliance advisor.
People rarely say “here’s what I appreciate about you” directly. But they leave traces of it everywhere:
Most businesses collect a lot of this information without ever reading it as a whole. Data, in this sense, isn’t only charts. It’s a structured way of listening.
There’s research that supports looking closely at what people actually write. In a 2020 study published in the American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics, researchers at the University of Washington analyzed online reviews of orthodontists in North America, focusing on negative reviews. They found that ratings were very positive overall, but roughly half of the orthodontists in their sample had at least one negative review. The most common complaint categories were quality of care or service, interpersonal interactions, and money or financial issues. Orthodontists who posted responses to negative reviews had better average ratings, though the authors noted that this association doesn’t show cause and effect.
The study looked at complaints, not appreciation. But it’s a reminder of something useful: what people write in reviews tends to cluster into a small number of themes. Many of them are about how people were treated, not only about the clinical work. If that’s true of complaints, it’s often true of praise as well. The way to find out for your own business is to read.
The office manager’s first step wasn’t a dashboard. It was reading. That matters, because numbers alone can hide what people actually say.
A star rating tells you how someone felt overall. It doesn’t tell you why. Two five-star reviews can be about completely different things: one about the orthodontist’s skill, another about how the front desk handled a scheduling mix-up. A three-star review might contain the most useful sentence of the year.
So the practice begins with a simple exercise. The office manager reads every review from the past year and writes down, in a few words, what each one appreciates or criticizes. She doesn’t use categories yet. She just notes what people said.
After reading, she sorts her notes into a handful of themes. For this practice, they look something like this:
Now the practice has something more useful than a rating. It has a picture of what families value, in their own words.
An orthodontic practice serves two audiences at once: the parents who make decisions and pay the bills, and the kids and teenagers who sit in the chair. They often appreciate different things.
When the office manager separates her notes by who wrote them, a pattern appears. Parents tend to appreciate clarity, reliability, and communication: knowing the plan, getting reminders, having questions answered quickly. Teens tend to appreciate respect: being spoken to directly, not being lectured, having a say in small choices like the color of their bands.
That difference matters. If the practice only listens to parents, it might miss what makes a teenager willing to come back for appointments without a fight. If it only listens to teens, it might miss what makes parents comfortable referring a friend. The practice decides to look at both, and to make sure its team knows that “being treated like a grown-up” is something teens notice and value.
Adult patients are a third, smaller group. Their notes often mention flexibility around work schedules and discreet treatment options. The practice adds them as a separate theme so their needs don’t get lost in the family picture.
The practice also sends a short survey after certain appointments: one question about how likely the family is to recommend the practice, and an optional comment box. Depending on your edition and how your account is set up, the WeKinnect Marketing Platform can send review requests and short satisfaction surveys by email or text after a visit, and track the results over time.
The score is useful as a trend. The comments are where the appreciation lives. The office manager reads them the same way she read the reviews and adds them to her themes.
One rule matters here: the practice asks every family the same way. It doesn’t send review requests only to families it expects to be happy. The FTC’s guide for marketers, Soliciting and Paying for Online Reviews, says plainly not to ask for reviews only from customers you think will leave positive ones, and to know the rules of the platforms where reviews appear. It also cautions against asking staff, family, or friends for reviews without disclosure, and against conditioning any incentive on a positive review. This is general information, not legal advice. For a business trying to understand what people appreciate, asking everyone the same way also gives a truer picture.
Reviews arrive on several sites. Survey comments arrive by email. Notes live in the scheduling system or on sticky notes at the front desk. When everything is scattered, it’s hard to see patterns.
Depending on your edition and how your account is set up, the WeKinnect Marketing Platform can bring reviews from many sites into one dashboard, track review count and rating trends over time, and let you ask plain-language questions about your review and survey data in a chat. The regular performance report can include a reputation section alongside other parts of your online presence.
That doesn’t replace reading. It makes reading easier. Instead of opening five websites, the office manager opens one, reads what came in this week, and adds anything new to her themes.
Appreciation also shows up before people ever become patients. Depending on your setup, Google Business Profile insights in the platform can show the search terms people used when they found the practice.
If parents are finding the practice by searching for things like “orthodontist for kids” or “gentle orthodontist,” that’s a clue about what they’re hoping for. If those words match what current families praise in reviews, the practice knows it’s describing itself accurately. If they don’t match, there’s a gap between what people are looking for and what the practice is known for.
Some of the most meaningful appreciation is spoken, not written. A parent tells the assistant that the follow-up call last week meant a lot. A teenager tells the orthodontist she finally smiled in her school photo.
The practice asks its team to write down short notes when they hear something like this, without including health details. Depending on your setup, the platform’s CRM lets the team add notes to a contact’s record, so those moments aren’t lost. The rule is simple: write what the family appreciated, not anything about their treatment or health, and never anything the family wouldn’t want written down.
A health care practice has to be especially careful about how it uses what it learns. Protected health information is covered by federal privacy rules, and many states add their own. Public reviews raise a specific risk: a reply that confirms someone is a patient, or mentions their treatment, can disclose information the practice isn’t allowed to share.
The practice follows a few simple rules, as general information, not legal advice:
Understanding what people appreciate is only useful if it changes something. The practice uses its themes in four ways.
Do more of it. Families appreciate the follow-up call after braces go on. The practice makes it standard for every new patient, not just when someone has time.
Thank the people behind it. The front-desk coordinator is mentioned by name in many reviews and comments. The orthodontist thanks her specifically at the next team meeting and reads a few of the comments aloud.
Fix what’s in the way. A small but steady number of comments mention money confusion. The practice rewrites its payment-plan explanation, trains the team to walk through it the same way every time, and watches whether those comments decline.
Describe yourself honestly. The practice updates its website and listing descriptions to reflect what families actually value: a team that knows your kid’s name, follow-up after every adjustment, and clear explanations. It doesn’t quote reviews or make claims it can’t support.
It helps to follow a single theme from discovery to action. Take “feeling cared for after appointments.”
What the office manager noticed. Several reviews and survey comments mentioned a phone call the evening after braces went on. Parents said it made them feel like the practice cared. But when she checked with the team, she learned the calls only happened when one particular assistant had time. Some families got them; others didn’t.
What the practice decided. Every new patient gets a call the evening after braces go on, and families can choose a text instead if they prefer. The call has one purpose: to ask how the patient is feeling and whether they have questions. It isn’t a sales call and doesn’t ask for a review.
Who’s responsible. The assistant who worked with the patient that day makes the call. If she’s out, the front-desk coordinator covers it.
How the practice will know. The office manager watches whether comments about follow-up become more frequent and whether any families mention not receiving a call. She doesn’t set a target number. She just keeps reading.
That’s what turning appreciation into practice looks like. Not a campaign. A small, consistent habit that families already said they valued.
People who write reviews or survey comments are giving the practice something valuable: their time and their honesty. The practice thanks them, carefully.
For public reviews, replies are short and warm and never mention treatment or confirm that the writer is a patient. Something like “Thank you for taking the time to share this. We’re glad to hear it,” followed by an invitation to call the office with any questions, is enough.
For survey comments, the office manager sometimes calls a family to say thank you, especially when a comment includes a useful suggestion. When a suggestion leads to a change, she tells them. That closes the loop and shows that someone actually read what they wrote.
The practice doesn’t offer anything in exchange for reviews or survey responses. Thanks is thanks.
Data has limits. A few the practice keeps in mind:
That’s why the practice treats data as a way to listen more carefully, not as a scoreboard.
The themes are most useful when the whole team sees them. Reviews are often read by one person, if at all. The team members who are mentioned may never know.
Once a month, the office manager brings a short summary to the team meeting. It isn’t a slide deck. It’s a single page with three parts: what families appreciated this month, in a few of their own words with names removed; who on the team was mentioned and for what; and one thing that families found frustrating.
The effect is quiet but real. Team members hear that the small things they do, remembering a name, making a nervous kid laugh, explaining a bill patiently, are noticed. The orthodontist hears what families value beyond the clinical results. And everyone sees the same problems at the same time, which makes them easier to fix together.
The office manager is careful with the summary. It never includes anything about a patient’s treatment or health, and it doesn’t single out anyone for criticism in front of the group. Complaints that involve a specific team member are handled privately.
To keep this going, the office manager sets a monthly routine. It takes about an hour:
The routine is small enough to keep. The insights add up over a year.
The same idea works for a very different organization. Imagine a nonprofit Friends of the Library group that runs a used-book sale, funds summer reading programs, and recruits volunteers.
It might not have many online reviews. Instead, its traces of appreciation might live in volunteer sign-up comments, notes from the book sale, replies to its newsletter, and conversations at the library desk. It could use a short survey after the summer reading program and read the comments carefully.
Its themes might look different: families appreciating the summer program, volunteers appreciating the social side of the book sale, members appreciating the author talks. Its actions would be different too: more author talks, a thank-you event for volunteers, clearer information about where book-sale money goes.
It wouldn’t face the same health privacy rules, but it would still need to respect people’s privacy and ask permission before quoting anyone publicly.
The office manager’s afternoon with the reviews didn’t produce a new marketing campaign. It produced a clearer picture of what families already valued, and a short list of things to do more of, people to thank, and problems to fix.
That’s what data can do when it’s used to listen. It helps a business notice what people appreciate, so the gratitude can go both ways.
If you’d like help setting up a simple way to understand what your customers, patients, or supporters appreciate, start a conversation with WeKinnect. Bring a few months of reviews and comments, and we’ll read them with you.
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
Written By
Hollis Bennett writes for WeKinnect Global Branding Agency on Reputation Management and the Marketing Platform. Guided by the core value of Service before Self, Hollis writes for entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses. WeKinnect serves clients across restaurants, arts, travel and tourism, banking, home services, nonprofits, and the pet industry. In every piece on reputation and the marketing platform, Hollis keeps Service before Self at the heart of the work.
Picture a woman standing in her kitchen in early December, holding a dress she bought for a holiday party. It's two inches too long.
On the first Monday of January, a woman searches for an eye doctor near her office. She has new insurance, a cracked pair of glasses
A new year plan fails most often because it lives in five places. A note on a phone. A spreadsheet on a laptop. A paper calendar by
Search changes quietly. Every year brings new screens, new labels, and new ways for results to appear. A business can spend a year a