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Corporate Profile: Intuit Demandforce by Benjamin Lund, Editor, Dentaltown Magazine

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by Benjamin Lund, Editor,
Dentaltown Magazine

Demandforce continues to define the cutting edge of marketing and communications innovation for small businesses. It provides small businesses – from salons to auto shops to dentists – with affordable and easy access to the tools to help communicate with customers, build a strong online reputation and leverage network marketing.

We sat down with Patrick Barry, VP Product Management, and Darci Wingard, Business Development Manager, to learn more about what Demandforce has to offer dentists, and why Townies have awarded the company with 13 Townie Choice Awards to date.




How long have you been with Demandforce? What are your responsibilities? Tell us about your career prior to working with Demandforce.
Patrick Barry: I have been at Demandforce since 2009. I manage the company’s product roadmap, user experience and go-to-market strategy. My teams develop the features, messaging and corporate partnerships behind Demandforce’s growth. Previously, I spent five years at Yahoo, Inc., where I was Vice President of Product Management.

Darci Wingard: I have more than seven years of sales and marketing experience specifically in the dental industry and have been with Demandforce since 2008. I started in the sales division and worked my way into business development. I am now responsible for building and strengthening partnership opportunities in the dental space.

Can you give us a little history about Demandforce?
Barry: Demandforce was founded in 2003 by Rick Berry who was soon joined by Sam Osman. They first created the product for dental practices, shortly followed by expanding it to automotive shops. Today we serve small businesses across the U.S. and Canada, and our product has been instrumental in generating more than $4 billion in incremental revenue for our customers.

How has the company evolved since its inception?
Barry: We now serve more than 22 different industries with nearly 200 unique management system integrations and serve tens of thousands of small businesses. Every day, Demandforce enables an average of 100,000 unique appointment confirmations and thousands of other communications for its customers. In a single week, it delivers more than 15 million individual e-mails and two million text messages. To take advantage of serving so many different types of businesses, we created the Intuit Local network in which we give our customers free local advertising and exposure to consumers visiting local, non-competing businesses. This trusted network effect has brought our dental customers countless new patients and as our overall customer base grows, so will the benefit for our existing customers. Along with many other product enhancements, in the past year we have launched an automated postcard service, family messaging, a recurring e-mail campaign tool and automated review syndication to Microsoft Bing.

As a result of our growth, Intuit took notice and acquired Demandforce in May of 2012. Demandforce still operates physically separate in San Francisco but now has the financial backing and strong network of Intuit to power its continued growth.

How would you explain Demandforce to a dentist meeting you for the first time?
Wingard: Demandforce is an award-winning marketing and patient communications solution that automates reminders, confirmations and review collection to effectively communicate with current patients and enhance a practice’s online reputation to attract new ones. Demandforce syncs seamlessly with your existing practice management system to save your front office time, reduce no-shows, get your patients back in more often and improve your local exposure to attract the “right type” of new patients.

Can you tell us a little about the corporate culture at Demandforce?
Wingard: Demandforce still operates in many ways like a grown-up tech start up. With more than 500 employees, we take up five floors of a building that is right in the heart of downtown San Francisco. The floors have an open layout and some even have break areas with video games, foosball and a kitchen filled with snacks delivered daily. Demandforce makes it a priority to give back with quarterly organized volunteering efforts including in-house organized food or clothing drives as well as offsite activities like volunteering at local homeless centers, soup kitchens and the food bank.

What is Demandforce’s business philosophy?
Wingard: Demandforce’s mission is to help small businesses thrive in an evolving and increasingly complex connected world. Demandforce bundles the marketing and communications tools that any business needs to succeed with customers today into one powerful web-based application that seamlessly integrates with existing workflow systems, works automatically and delivers guaranteed results.

What sets Demandforce apart from its competition?
Barry: We really pride ourselves on our focus on innovation while maintaining the most advanced and stable technology available for our customers. Since we serve so many small businesses, we have upgraded both our network and servers to support hundreds of thousands of unique confirmations and communications daily. Our e-mails are mobile enabled, so regardless of whether recipients are using desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile devices, our e-mails will detect and render accordingly to ensure the highest read and response rates. We have also innovated our incoming text recognition system, so whether a patient responds to an appointment reminder with a “yes,” “ok” or with a “C” as instructed, we will intelligently process the response so that a practice will never miss a confirmation. This attention to detail is what ensures that our product is the most advanced and reliable on the market.

What sort of involvement do dentists have in the research and development of your products?
Barry: Since Demandforce was first available, we have maintained a constant feedback loop with our dental customers in working on ways to make Demandforce the best product fit possible. Many of our product feature additions have come as direct results of requests from our dental practices. We also leverage Intuit’s D4D program or “Design for Delight.” The program focuses on learning about how our customers interact with and use our product in their everyday lives to help us prioritize future advancements and enhancements. When we are adding new features, we also have “Usability Testing” through which our engineering and product teams can sit down and observe how real dentists and office managers are using the product. This allows us to make the best decisions regarding feature developments and usability.

What has Demandforce become best known for in dentistry?
Wingard: Demandforce has become best known for being the industry innovators in bringing in new patients. Intuit Local truly leverages the fact that we serve businesses in various industries. When patients confirm their appointments at a non-competing local business, they are prompted to check out local businesses nearby. Then a dentist’s name and reviews are displayed. Should they be interested, they are taken to that dentist’s business profile page where they can read business information, recent reviews and even request an appointment right away.

Secondly, we have an online community of customers called Generation Demandforce with which we connect our users to one another in a social setting. Users have access to the community 24/7 where they can find and answer each other’s questions regarding the product, as well as share ways to get the most out of Demandforce. After introducing this community in October 2012, we already have more than three million post views and more than 385,000 user visits. The community is reimagining help and support.

Here is an example of a real Demandforce customer helping another user:

Advice on Reaching Lost Patients

Q: “Hello Demandforce friends, I need your advice! We want to make contact with lost patients. Also are any of you having these issues trying to get patients to come back?”

A: “We had a successful promotion last month. All patients that we saw in August were entered into a raffle to win four baseball tickets. It kept people on the schedule and brought back a few too. In the future we may do movie tickets or another sporting event.”

What can your customers expect when they purchase Demandforce?
Barry:
  • A system that is easy to learn
  • A system where you can see results right away
  • A system that is stable and dependable
  • A constant stream of additional features and enhancements usually at no extra cost to the user
  • A 3:1 value guarantee – for every $1 you spend on Demandforce, you will see $3 in value
  • A reliable support team and access to the Demandforce community to find the answer to any
    product question

How do you obtain customer feedback and what do you do with that information?
Barry: In addition to the D4D program I mentioned, we do customer satisfaction surveys as well as monitor the Generation Demandforce community to see what real customers are asking for or struggling with. We then take the feedback to our product, support and success teams to see what we can do right away to improve in certain categories and what product features need to be added to our product roadmap. It is also common that our product team will reach out to current customers to collect additional feedback about feature additions.

How has Dentaltown impacted Demandforce’s business?
Barry: Demandforce is a proud winner of 13 Townie Choice Awards over the past five years. Because Dentaltown has such respect in the profession and only allows licensed dentists and hygienists to vote, it is a huge point of pride for us to win the awards.

What are you most proud of at Demandforce?
Barry: I am most proud of what our engineering and product teams have accomplished in such a short amount of time. They have been instrumental in our success and expansion. When we were first meeting with Intuit to discuss the acquisition, they were blown away by the innovative thinking and the passion that the team exhibits. We do whatever it takes to make our product and our customers successful, and this is the spirit that drives the culture of our team.

What is the most rewarding experience you’ve had working with dentists?
Barry: I think the most rewarding experience is speaking to our dentists who have been using the Demandforce system for years now who are still seeing new patients come into their practices. They also are always so thankful of how many features and enhancements we have added since they first signed up. Since dental was our first industry, our longest-time customers are dentists and they have been on board for 10 years!

What are you most excited about when it comes to the future of Demandforce?
Barry: I am most excited about how we will expand the Intuit Local network even further and continue to evolve our product as today’s online world transforms. A recent example is the transition from the desktop or laptop to mobile device usage. Since more than 60 percent of Americans are now reading e-mails on their phones (Source: Yesmail 2013), we had to ensure that every patient communication Demandforce sent on behalf of a practice was easy to read on any device. Our team came together and gave all of our communications a makeover – anything from an e-mail reminder to a newsletter or promotion now has a “responsive” design that ensures it is easy to view and all buttons are accessible on whatever device the patient is using. With the world moving to mobile, Americans are changing their habits and using tools like Apple Passbook and Google Now. We have integrated our appointment reminder features right into these applications and this adoption has already led to fewer missed appointments.

What can the dental profession expect to see from Demandforce in the next five years?
Wingard: You can expect Demandforce to further evolve to help practices address the challenges in our evolving Internet economy. Intuit recently acquired Full Slate, an online appointment scheduler. Therefore, dentists can expect advancement in our online appointment scheduling technology.

They can also expect two-way confirmation technology upgrades with additional management systems and more management system integrations to be built. We hope that additional dental specialties including periodontics and oral surgery will soon be able to take advantage of the features our dentists have enjoyed for more than 10 years.

Lastly, they can expect Demandforce to remain committed to dental. We may expand into other industries but dental is where we began and we are always looking to provide our tens of thousands of customers with the best product possible.

Dentaltown Magazine
September 2025
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