The reputation health score: one number that replaces your Monday meeting

Multi-location owners told us the same thing in every onboarding call: "I have dashboards. What I don't have is time." Ratings in one tab, review volume in another, staff mentions in a spreadsheet, sentiment in a tool nobody logged into after week two. The reputation health score exists to collapse all of it into one number — not because detail is bad, but because the detail only gets read when one number says it should be.

What goes into the score

The score blends five signals: your average rating, the momentum of that rating (is it climbing or coasting), review volume against your footfall, response rate and speed, and the balance of sentiment in the themes guests mention. No single signal dominates — a 4.7 rating built on three reviews a month scores lower than a 4.5 built on two hundred, because volume is trust. The exact weights are deliberately boring and deliberately stable; a score that moves because the formula moved is worse than useless.

How to read a dip

When the score drops, the point is not the drop — it is the reason. The drill-downs attribute the movement: one location or all of them, one week or a slow slide, staff-level mentions or menu-level ones. A dip with a named cause is a Tuesday task; a dip without one is a quarter of anxiety. That is the entire philosophy: the score is the alarm, the drill-downs are the investigation, and the weekly digest is the habit that keeps both honest.

Ending the Monday-morning argument

The quieter benefit is cultural. When three partners argue about whose branch is slipping, they are arguing from memory and anecdote. When the health score says Koramangala 87, HSR 81, Indiranagar 79 — with the keyword radar showing "parking" spiking at HSR for two straight weeks — the argument ends and the valet tie-up gets signed. Owners tell us this is the feature that survived longest after the novelty wore off: one number, per location, per week, with the reasons attached.

A score you can run the business by has to be boring in the right ways: stable formula, honest inputs, named causes. Anything flashier is a toy.