Satisfaction, and the same figure weighted by what customers actually pay

Two figures are now live on your dashboard and in the KPI dictionary. They are the same responses counted two ways, and the interesting part is where they disagree.

Satisfaction average

The mean of the scores your customers recorded in the period, to one decimal, with the number of responses behind it stated beside it. Open it and every response is there — the engagement, the customer, the date the work was delivered, the date they answered, their score, and the improvement they suggested where they left one. The rows add up to exactly the average shown.

A response counts in the period the customer answered in, not the period the work was delivered in. An answer that arrives after a month closes lands in the month it arrived; the closed month is not restated.

Beside the average sits the response rate, with its own basis stated rather than blended in: how many surveys went out in the period, how many came back, and how many are still open. A survey that is still waiting for an answer is shown as open, never counted as a refusal.

Revenue-weighted satisfaction

The same scores, weighted by what each customer has actually paid you. A plain average treats a small engagement and a large one identically, so it can read healthy while the customers carrying your revenue are the unhappy ones. The weighted figure answers the commercial question instead.

It never appears without the share of collected spend it rests on. A weighted average covering a quarter of what you billed is a different claim from one covering nearly all of it, and the figure says which it is every time.

Both figures are shown together with the difference between them stated, so you do not have to work out which way the gap runs.

Open it and you get your top customers by collected spend, each with their satisfaction score or “no response”, and their share of spend. A customer who pays and never answers is in that table: they count in the coverage denominator and contribute nothing to the score, rather than quietly being treated as neutral or as average. Where the top ten does not cover everyone who paid, the share it does cover is stated along with how many paying customers there are in total. Each customer’s row opens to their own collections.

Nothing is published on too little evidence

Below three recorded responses neither figure is published. Instead of a number nobody should quote, the surface says how many responses it has, how many it needs, and lists the responses so far with the surveys still unanswered beside them. That holds for the weighted figure too — weighting a thin average by revenue does not make it sturdier.

One thing worth knowing

Responses recorded before this release carry their answer date approximately: it is taken from the last time the response was written to, which for most is the day it was answered. Dates are exact from here forward.