Silence Is Not Satisfaction

Client	Nazuby.cz — a B2B e-shop selling consumables to dental hygienists and small dental practices
My role	research lead — methodology design, interview moderation, full thematic analysis, final presentation and recommendations
Scope	10 semi-structured interviews, about 60 minutes each, July 2026
Provided by the client	a participant panel recruited from their CRM database

The brief

Nazuby.cz wanted to know one thing: what do they need to offer or fix to become a regular supplier to dental hygienists and small practices — a segment that currently buys in a fragmented way from three to ten different suppliers at once.

The brief contained four specific sub-areas (the biggest pain in managing supplies, conditions for trying an alternative brand, technological adaptability — subscriptions, inventory-tracking apps, repeat baskets, automatic reminders) and one working hypothesis: “dental professionals don’t care only about price, mainly that purchasing doesn’t eat into their operations.”

My job was to find out which parts of that hold up — and which don’t.

Process

I built the interviews around concrete experience, not opinions — I asked what they did last time, not what they would wish for. In qualitative research, the difference between what people think they do and what they describe when you lead them back to a specific situation is fundamental.

I based the analysis on reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke) — I coded the entire corpus, not just a selection of nice quotes. And I set myself one rule that ultimately proved to be the most important decision of the whole project: don’t assume customers are satisfied. Ask about a problem and don’t settle for the first answer.

That rule led me to the strongest finding of the whole study.

What we found

1. The absence of complaints is not satisfaction — it’s a silent exit

I asked nine of the ten participants what annoys them about suppliers. Nine answered with some version of “nothing comes to mind.” A few minutes later, the same women described damaged goods they threw away rather than call to file a claim, missing items nobody bothered to tell them about, an email that never got a reply.

They don’t complain because the phone call costs them more than the damage they’ve suffered. For the business, this means that in this segment dissatisfaction doesn’t show up as a complaint — it shows up as the customer ordering elsewhere next time, and you never find out. Monitoring satisfaction passively (waiting for complaints) practically doesn’t work in this segment; you have to ask actively.

2. Price gets you into the game. Friction doesn’t keep you in it.

Nine out of ten said price decides when choosing a supplier. But in the same interviews, the same women described buying the same things from the same company for years, not tracking prices, and having no time for it. One even doesn’t use the pro account with a discount that she has for free — “it never occurred to me.”

In the sample there were only two documented cases of someone actually leaving a supplier — and neither was because of a price increase. One was because of a courier who kept cancelling a patient’s treatment. The other was because of an inconvenient ordering interface at an otherwise strong brand. In practice this means that price competition won’t win a loyal customer — removing friction (the courier, the interface, being out of stock) is a cheaper and more effective lever for retention than a discount.

3. One category showed what a successful switch looks like

For most of the product range, willingness to try alternatives is low — because of a technical tie to expensive equipment, reputation with patients, or mandatory documentation. But in one specific category of consumables, four of the ten participants independently described switching to the client from the previously only, significantly more expensive player on the market. The common denominator: you could buy a small trial pack, and the product was comparable in quality.

This is a documented, repeatable pattern — not a hypothesis, but an actual switch that happened with four independent customers. It shows the concrete conditions under which a category can be won: find a place where the market is dominated by one expensive player, and offer a comparable alternative in a small trial pack.

4. An uncomfortable finding I decided not to hide

The presentation also included three findings that were harder to hear — among them the tension between the client’s competitive end price and the margins left to the practices that actively recommend its products to patients. One hygienist summed it up by saying that recommending a product to a patient currently costs her nothing, but doesn’t bring her anything either — and that this is starting to resonate among her colleagues.

I decided to present it in full, with quotes, knowing it would be harder to hear. At the same time, I was honest about the strength of the evidence — it was largely one strong voice, not a majority pattern, and I told the client so openly.

Recommendations and deliverable

I didn’t hand the findings to the client as a report, but as a 36-slide presentation — with an explicit divide between what the data said and what is my interpretation. I split the recommendations into two groups:

• Do right away — six cheap changes with clear support in the data (e.g. editable instructions for the courier, adding an item to an already submitted order, a clearer delivery note, actively asking about satisfaction after an order)
• Test before going all in — ideas where demand was real but weakly evidenced (e.g. subscriptions, expiry tracking), and where I’d recommend a small pilot instead of another round of interviews

It also included a conscious acknowledgement of the limits: the sample covers almost exclusively solo hygienists, the clinic segment was represented by a single person, and for two findings I said openly that the evidence is weaker and shouldn’t be presented as fact.

What I’d do differently next time

If I were to continue, the first thing I’d complete is precisely the missing segment of clinics and practices with employees — their purchasing behaviour differs structurally in every respect in the data I have (they plan ahead, keep inventory records, calculate margin), and it can’t be generalised to them from a sample of solo hygienists. I’d also replace hypothetical questions about non-existent services (e.g. subscriptions) with a small real pilot — in one case I noticed that a respondent was answering about a different, existing service than the one I was asking about, which is a methodological trap I wanted to point out in the presentation itself.

Note: The project is not under a signed NDA, but I generalised some numbers and specific business details for the purposes of this summary.