User manual
Everything your team needs to run Referral Intelligence: what each page shows, what the numbers mean, and where every action lives.
Welcome
Referral Intelligence is a growth operating system for orthodontic practices. It watches your referral network, ranks where attention will matter most, and turns that into a short weekly plan your team can actually finish.
The product is built around one loop. Referral data flows in from your practice management system or a CSV upload. The platform scores every referring relationship for volume, recency, and trend. Each week that scoring becomes a ranked list of actions, and every completed action is followed up with an honest read on whether referrals moved.
- Dashboard: your morning briefing. Pace against goal, what is at risk, and this week's plan.
- Referral Plan: the AI-generated weekly action list, plus the outcome history of everything you have completed.
- Relationships: the roster of every referring dentist, with a full profile page for each one.
- Opportunities: where the next referrals will come from, ranked by upside and risk, plus a national dentist directory.
- Surveys: what referring dentists say in confidential surveys, organized into themes.
- Settings: your practice details, Practice Playbook, team, surveys, data connections, and notifications.
Signing in and first-time setup
You join Referral Intelligence either by creating a practice yourself or by accepting an invitation from a practice owner.
- Sign in at the login page with your email and password, or continue with Google.
- If you are a new owner with no practice yet, a short setup screen asks for three things: practice name, practice type, and practice address. Everything else can wait.
- Select Create practice and you land on the Dashboard.
- If you were invited by email, follow the activation link in the invitation and set your password. You arrive already linked to your practice.
After setup, the Dashboard shows a banner inviting you to complete your Practice Playbook. The Playbook is a set of questions about how your practice likes to work, and it shapes every recommendation the platform makes. You can fill it in over time; progress saves per section.
Roles and permissions
There are two roles in a practice: Owner and Team member. Most of the app is identical for both.
| Area | Owner | Team member |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard, Referral Plan, Relationships, Opportunities, Surveys | Yes | Yes |
| Settings: Surveys, Practice, Data and integrations, Notifications, Account | Yes | Yes |
| Practice Playbook settings | Yes | Owner only |
| Team settings (invite, remove, change roles) | Yes | Owner only |
| Creating the practice at onboarding | Yes | Not applicable |
Owner-only pages show a notice to team members asking them to contact an owner. The signed-in owner cannot remove or demote themselves, so a practice always keeps at least one owner.
Dashboard
The Dashboard answers three questions in one screen: are we on pace, what is at risk, and what should we do this week.
The four KPI cards
- Referrals this month: progress toward your practice's monthly referral goal, with a pace pill that reads Ahead of pace or Behind pace and a year-over-year comparison.
- Estimated referral production: the dollar value of this month's referrals, next to the same period last year.
- Tracked relationships: the size of your network with a category mix breakdown (Active, Needs Attention, Moderate, At Risk, Inactive, New).
- At risk: how many relationships have gone quiet, compared with the same period last year. This card is red on purpose. It is the number the platform most wants you to protect.
Do this week
The same weekly plan that lives on the Referral Plan page appears here, so the morning check-in and the work itself are one screen apart. A fresh plan is generated for your practice every Monday morning. See the Referral Plan section for how the plan works.
Biggest opportunities
A short table of your highest-value moves, ranked by estimated upside, relationship risk, and urgency. Each row carries a type (Protect, Growth, or Recovery), a plain-language reason, and a concrete next step. View all opportunities opens the full Opportunities page.
What dentists are telling you
Quote cards from recent survey responses, with a View surveys link into the Surveys page. Below them, Recent wins summarizes measured outcomes from completed actions — new referrals this month, the biggest observed lift after a completed action, and how many relationship actions were finished recently.
Referral Plan
The Referral Plan page is where the week gets executed. Every Monday morning the platform generates a fresh plan of five actions from your live data. The page has two tabs: This week for open actions, and Completed for outcome history.
How the plan is made
The generator looks at your whole network and picks the five moves most likely to grow referrals: it weighs each relationship's referral gap, trend, and value, your Practice Playbook answers, and which tactics have historically produced lift for your practice. Each action names one dentist, uses the standard action types, and explains itself in plain language. A dentist appears at most once per plan.
- Automatic: a new plan arrives every Monday morning, and you get a Weekly plan ready notification when it lands.
- On demand: Regenerate plan in the page header rebuilds the plan for the current week. Anyone on the team can use it. The old plan is archived, not deleted, so history stays intact. Actions you added yourself stay on the new plan; completed actions do not carry forward — they remain on the Completed tab.
- Safe by design: if generation cannot produce a solid plan, your current plan stays untouched and the page tells you what happened. You never lose a plan to a failed attempt.
Anatomy of an action
- Rank: actions are ordered by what will move referrals most.
- Source tag: Performance (from referral data), Opportunity (from the opportunity ranking), Survey (from something a dentist said), or Manual (added by your team).
- Why: a one-line reason, for example a 90+ day silence or untapped potential a dentist stated in a survey.
- Impact badge: red for risk you are protecting, green for upside you are chasing.
Working the plan
- Generate brief: opens the meeting brief for the action's dentist, generating one first if none exists. See The relationship profile for what a brief contains.
- Schedule: pick a date for the action. Once saved, the button shows the date.
- Assign: hand the action to a specific team member, or leave it unassigned.
- Mark done: completes the action. A Done chip appears with an Undo option.
- Add action: create your own action with a title and a type (call, email, text, lunch, case review, CE event, thank-you note, visit, intro call, gift, send report, send survey, or other). Manual actions are tagged Manual and survive plan regeneration.
The Completed tab and referral lift
Each completed action gets an outcome chip once enough time has passed: a percentage referral lift observed, new referral activity observed, no measurable lift observed, or not enough data yet during the first 30 days. The wording is deliberate. The platform reports what happened after an action, and never claims the action caused it.
When enough outcomes accumulate, a What's working callout appears, for example showing that check-in calls average a given lift across your completed actions. Over time this tells you which tactics earn their place in your week.
Relationships
Relationships is your roster: every dentist referring to your practice, and everyone who could be.
Category filters and trends
The cards across the top (All, Active, Needs Attention, Moderate, At Risk, Inactive, New) show counts and filter the table when clicked. Referral Trends highlights the top three relationships rising and the top three slipping year over year, each with a sparkline.
The roster table
- Dentist: name and location, with a dot showing whether they have been surveyed.
- Category: computed automatically from referral recency and volume. See How the numbers work.
- Met: a simple checkbox for whether your team has met this dentist in person. You can toggle it right in the table.
- Referrals per month, Last referral, and Estimated production potential complete the row.
The relationship profile
Click any dentist to open their profile: performance, recommended next steps, a full interaction timeline, survey intelligence, and a living profile of personal context.
Snapshot and next steps
The quick stats strip covers referrals per month, the 12-month trend, production, last referral, last interaction, and survey status. Below it, Relationship snapshot charts the last 12 months of referrals, and Recommended next steps names the single most useful move right now with a plain-language reason.
Next steps and the weekly plan are one engine, not two. When this week's plan already contains an action for this dentist, the card shows that exact action, with the same complete and schedule controls. Only when the plan has nothing for this dentist does the card fall back to a suggested play.
Meeting briefs
Generate Meeting Brief prepares you for a conversation with this specific dentist. The brief pulls together their referral performance, your interaction history and notes, their survey answers, and the living profile, and turns it into a current situation summary, key context with risk and positive signals marked, personal reminders, any open follow-up, numbered talking points, and one suggested next action.
- Copy brief formats the whole brief as plain text so you can paste it anywhere.
- Regenerate produces a fresh brief from the latest data. Earlier briefs are kept, and the drawer always shows the newest one.
- Generate brief on a weekly plan action jumps straight here and opens the brief for that dentist, generating one first if needed.
Draft follow-up
Draft follow-up writes a ready-to-send message (subject and body) for this dentist, shaped by their communication preferences, your last interaction, and what they said in surveys. Review it, copy it, and send it from your own email or phone. Drafts are never stored: close the dialog and it is gone.
Interaction timeline and logging
The timeline merges referral events with the touchpoints your team logs, newest first. Log interaction opens a short form with a type, a date, and notes. Logging an in-person type (lunch, visit, case review, CE event, or intro call) automatically marks the relationship as Met.
The living profile
Relationship details is shared context for the whole team: birthday, key staff, communication preferences, favorite restaurant, a personal note, plus explicit Do and Don't fields. Whatever you save here also feeds meeting preparation later, so small details are worth recording.
Opportunities
Opportunities ranks where your next referrals will come from, and includes the national directory you prospect from.
The three opportunity types
| Type | What it means | Typical next step |
|---|---|---|
| Protect | A top referrer worth reinforcing before anything slips. | Book case review |
| Growth | A dentist referring below their stated or estimated potential. | Book lunch |
| Recovery | A relationship that has gone quiet or is declining. | Check in |
Each row explains why the relationship is surfaced now, the referral gap or risk, and the estimated production potential. If an opportunity is already covered by this week's plan, the next step column says so instead of offering a new action.
How the ranking works
Upside is the referral gap multiplied by your average case value. The opportunity score blends the gap (40 percent), the trend (25 percent), relationship value (20 percent), and plan coverage (15 percent). Opportunities not yet covered by a plan rank higher, so the list keeps pointing at work you have not started.
The dentist directory
Below the ranked list sits the full national directory. Search by name or NPI, filter by specialty, pick one of your practice locations, and set a radius in miles. The star on each row adds the dentist to your roster or removes them. Distances require a saved practice address in Settings, Practice.
Surveys
Surveys is where referring-dentist answers become insight: coverage of who has been heard from, recurring themes, individual responses, and a list of who to survey next.
Coverage
Two cards at the top split your network into dentists surveyed and not yet surveyed. Clicking either card switches the view below.
Not yet surveyed lists each missing relationship, sorted by estimated annual value, with a Send survey button on every row. Send to all offers a bulk send of the dentists on that list. Before anything goes out, the send confirms the current gift-card amount and checks eligibility so people who already have a live invitation, or who your Practice Playbook excludes from outreach, are not contacted again.
Key themes
The platform groups recurring sentiments across responses into named themes, each with a representative quote. Themes need at least three completed responses before they can be generated. Refresh themes rebuilds the set from the latest answers. When an action comes from something dentists keep saying, it carries a Survey source tag and often the quote itself.
Responses and By question
- Responses: every dentist who has answered, newest first. View response opens a drawer with highlights and signals, plus Create action and Open relationship. Create action adds a Survey-tagged item to this week's plan.
- By question: every dentist's answer to one question, side by side, with a question navigator. Answers that match an existing theme are labeled.
Surveys, end to end
Surveys are how referring dentists tell you the truth. They are confidential, short, and require no account on the dentist's side.
Building a survey
Go to Settings, Surveys. Create a survey with a title, then open it to add questions one at a time: the prompt, a type (short text, long text, multiple choice, multi select, true/false, number, or percentage), whether it is required, answer options, and optional helper text. Questions can be reordered. A survey moves through draft, published, and closed states, and only published surveys can be sent. A read-only global library of platform-managed surveys sits alongside your own.
What the dentist sees
- The dentist opens their private invitation link and sees a landing page framing the survey as independent feedback, with a time estimate and a note that no account is needed.
- All questions sit on one page with a progress meter counting required answers.
- After submitting, a thank-you page confirms receipt. If an incentive is attached, the dentist can redeem a gift card right there.
- Opening a used link again shows You've already submitted this survey. If a gift card was attached, Open your gift card is still available.
There is also a public open-link version of the dentist survey. Anyone with that link can answer; two extra questions collect the respondent's name and email, for 14 questions total (the 12 canonical dentist questions plus name and email). Those answers are not attached to a specific relationship on your roster.
The gift-card amount is set by the platform administrator — $100 by default — and is locked onto each invitation at the moment it is sent. Changing the amount later does not change invitations already out.
Where answers go
- The Surveys page: themes, the response list, and the by-question comparison.
- The Dashboard's What dentists are telling you cards.
- The Survey intelligence panel on each relationship profile.
- Survey-tagged actions in the weekly plan.
- Surveyed and not-yet-surveyed indicators across the roster.
How the numbers work
The platform computes categories, potential, and outcomes from your referral history. Nothing here is hand-set, so two team members always see the same truth.
Relationship categories
Categories come from referral recency and volume, evaluated in priority order. The first matching rule wins.
| Category | Rule |
|---|---|
| Needs Attention | Last referral 31 to 90 days ago, and at least 3 referrals in the last 12 months |
| At Risk | Last referral 91 to 120 days ago |
| Active | Last referral within 30 days, and at least 3 referrals in the last 12 months |
| Moderate | Last referral within 90 days, volume below the Active bar |
| Inactive | Last referral more than 120 days ago |
| New | No referral history yet (a prospect) |
Met, category, and opportunity type are separate
Met is a simple yes or no your team controls. Category is computed from referral behavior. Opportunity type (Protect, Growth, Recovery) is a third, independent read. A dentist can be Active by category and still be a Protect opportunity because they are worth defending.
Estimated production potential
When actual production is not available, dollar figures use your practice-wide production value per referral, which defaults to 6,000 dollars and lives in Settings, Practice. Changing it recalculates every estimated production figure in the app. Referral potential (for example, referring 9 of a potential 22) comes from a manual override first, then from what the dentist stated in a survey.
Referral lift
After an action is completed, the platform watches the following weeks and reports what it observes: a percentage lift, new referral activity, or no measurable change. Results within the first 30 days read as not enough data yet. The language is always observational, because many things move referrals at once.
How the AI works
Three features are generated by AI: the weekly plan, meeting briefs, and draft follow-ups. They all follow the same rules, so you always know what the AI saw and what it is allowed to do.
What it works from
Generation is grounded in your own data: referral metrics and trends, relationship categories and opportunity scores, your Practice Playbook answers, survey responses, living profile details, and interaction notes. Nothing is invented. Every number in a generated action restates a number the platform computed, and the plan can only name dentists who are actually on your roster.
Guardrails
- Playbook first: activities you marked No are never suggested, and your stated goals, comfort zones, and weekly time shape tactic choice.
- Validated before saved: every generated action is checked against your roster and the standard vocabulary. Anything that does not pass is dropped, and a plan that cannot reach a solid floor of valid actions is rejected outright.
- Never destructive: a failed generation leaves your current plan exactly as it was. Briefs are kept as history rather than overwritten, and drafts are never stored at all.
- Honest language: outcome copy stays observational. The platform says lift was observed after an action, never that the action caused it.
When something goes wrong
Failures are visible, not silent. A regenerate that fails shows a message and keeps the prior plan. If the practice's AI access is not set up, buttons report that AI features are not configured instead of pretending to work. You will never see fake content standing in for a failed generation.
Settings
Settings is organized into seven areas: Practice, Practice Playbook, Team, Surveys, Data and integrations, Notifications, and Account.
Practice
Keep the practice name, specialty, and locations accurate. Locations drive the distance and radius filters on Opportunities, and one location is always marked primary. This page also holds the practice logo and the production value per referral used across all dollar estimates.
Practice Playbook (owners)
The Playbook captures how your practice operates: an overview, how referral data arrives and who is safe to contact, your current strategy, which relationship activities you will and will not do, time and budget, how you want to be coached, and your goals. Answers guide recommendations. A No on an activity is a hard guardrail the platform respects; Not sure keeps an activity exploratory. Contact exclusions set here also govern survey sends.
Team (owners)
Invite teammates by email as Owner or Team member. Pending invitations can be resent or revoked, and members can be removed with a confirmation step.
Surveys
Build your team's surveys and browse the global survey library. Create a survey, add and reorder questions, then publish it so it can be sent from the Surveys page. Opening a team survey opens the editor; opening a global survey is read-only. See Surveys, end to end for the dentist-facing flow.
Data and integrations
Connect a practice management system (Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Curve Dental, Cloud9, tab32, and more as they roll out), or upload referral data manually as CSV. The template requires dentist name, practice name, and referral date, with production amount optional. Import history shows each file with its result, including partial imports with skipped rows.
Notifications
- Weekly plan ready: delivered when the weekly action plan is prepared, Monday morning.
- At-risk alerts: a relationship enters the At Risk category.
- New survey response: a dentist completes a survey.
Email arrives as a daily digest of unread notifications rather than one message per event. In-app notifications live in the sidebar user card, with a mark-all-as-read control.
Account
Your profile photo, name, and login email; password changes; plan status and billing contact; and sign out.
What's coming next
A few surfaces are visible in the app today but arrive fully in upcoming releases.
- Referral and CSV import: a working path to load referral history so a new practice is not stuck with an empty roster. The Data and integrations page previews this track today.
- Reports: dentist one-pagers and monthly practice summaries you can send. The Reports item is already in the sidebar; Send report already exists as an action type.
- Deeper practice-management integrations on the Data and integrations page.
Questions, feedback, or something that looks wrong? Write to hello@referintel.com and include the page you were on.