Needs Attention: the HQ enablement list for underutilized franchisees

What the Needs Attention row is

Needs Attention is the second tile row on HQ's Impact page. Where the Value Captured row above it celebrates the franchisees proving out Verinode's dollar value, Needs Attention flips the lens: it lists the franchisees whose engagement with Verinode over the last 30 days has been graded Underutilized. It exists for one purpose: to give you a short, self-updating list to work from when you're planning outreach, a coaching call, or a regional check-in, without having to scroll the full franchisee roster looking for who's gone quiet.

This is read entirely from a nightly rollup. HQ never opens a franchisee's own decisions, jobs, IU ledger, or IQ conversation history to build this row. The same cron that fills in the rest of the Impact page (Value Captured, the network hero, Engagement) also computes each franchisee's utilization grade from that franchisee's own Impact metrics, then writes a name and a handful of aggregate numbers into a network-level table. That is the only thing HQ's Impact page reads. See Impact: the network's return on Verinode for how the whole page fits together, and What HQ sees: the network privacy boundary for the full trust model behind that boundary.

Where to find it

Open Impact from the Intelligence group in the HQ sidebar, alongside Benchmarks, Margin & Cash, and Forecasting, at hq.verinode.ai/impact (the longer /franchise/impact path resolves to the same page). Needs Attention is the middle of the page's three tile rows: Value Captured sits above it, Engagement sits below it, and the network hero sits above both. There is no separate page or tab for Needs Attention on its own, it is one row on the Impact page.

Why a franchisee lands here: the utilization grade

Every franchisee with a rollup snapshot this window gets one of three utilization grades: Strong, Steady, or Underutilized. The grade is Verinode's read of how actively a franchisee is engaging with IQ, weighing two things together: how often the franchisee actually acts on the decisions Verinode surfaces to it, and how much time it's spending working inside IQ day to day. A franchisee that consistently acts on what IQ finds and stays engaged grades Strong. One with some activity but not a sustained pattern grades Steady. One with little to no action on surfaced decisions and minimal time in IQ grades Underutilized, and that is the grade this row exists to surface.

Only franchisees graded Underutilized appear in this row. Strong and Steady franchisees never show up here, even if their numbers are modest, this row is not a full ranking of the network, it's a short, deliberately narrow flag list for the ones who need a nudge.

Reading a tile

Each tile in the row carries four pieces of information plus a small chart:

• Label: the word "Underutilized." Every tile in this row carries the same label, since the row itself is already filtered to that grade.
• Headline: the franchisee's name.
• Sub-line: one of two lines, depending on whether the franchisee had any decisions surfaced to it in the window:

- "[N] of [N] decisions acted" (for example, "6 of 14 decisions acted") when Verinode surfaced at least one decision to the franchisee. - "No IQ activity this window" when the franchisee had nothing surfaced at all, the sharpest version of "quiet."

• The marker chart: a small horizontal track showing the franchisee's own acted-of-surfaced ratio as a point on a 0-100 scale, with a fixed reference mark at the halfway point of the track. This is the "acted-of-surfaced ratio marker": it's the franchisee's own percentage of surfaced decisions it actually acted on, plotted against that reference point so you can see at a glance how far short of a healthy pace this franchisee is running. Because every tile in this row already carries the Underutilized grade, the marker renders in Ember Red. This chart only appears when the franchisee had decisions surfaced (the "No IQ activity this window" tiles have nothing to chart).

Visually, tiles in this row use the same accent-rail-and-chip treatment IQ uses for its own Take Action decision tiles: a solid Ember Red rail down the left edge and the "Underutilized" label rendered as a filled chip rather than a plain caption, with a small leading glyph icon. That's a deliberate choice, it's the same visual language the platform uses to say "this needs a decision," applied here at the franchisee level instead of the decision level.

Sort order and the 8-tile cap

The row is sorted by fewest decisions acted first, so the most disengaged franchisees sit at the front of the row, and it is capped at 8 tiles. If more than 8 franchisees grade Underutilized in a given window, the row shows only the 8 with the fewest acted decisions, the ones most worth reaching first.

Clicking through

Clicking any tile opens that franchisee in the Franchisees directory, filtered to that location, the same destination every tile on the Impact page's three rows opens to. From there you get that franchisee's fuller profile: location and size, compliance standing, profitability position, and adopted programs, all still read from network-level rollup tables, never from the franchisee's own private business data.

Empty state

If no franchisee on your active roster grades Underutilized this window, the row reads:

"No underutilized franchisees. Every active location is acting on decisions or engaging with IQ."

That is the state you want to see. It doesn't mean the row is broken or that data hasn't loaded, it means every franchisee with a snapshot this window is either Strong or Steady. The row simply has nothing to list until a franchisee's engagement slips.

An enablement list, not a compliance flag

It's worth being precise about what this row is not, because HQ has two other places that can look similar at a glance and mean something different:

• It is not the Watchlist. The Watchlist tile on Network Health is an automatic ranking, the bottom quarter of the composite office leaderboard, based on benchmark performance. It tells you who is ranking low on the numbers the network tracks. Needs Attention tells you who isn't engaging with Verinode, which is a separate question from how that franchisee is actually performing.
• It is not the interventions queue. An intervention is something a human HQ admin decided to raise about a specific franchisee, with a reason attached (engagement dropped, margin trending below network, a compliance gap, a brand-protection concern). Interventions require a person to flag them and they carry a formal reason and follow-up trail. Needs Attention requires nothing from anyone, it's generated automatically every night from engagement data alone, and a franchisee can appear and disappear from it without any admin ever touching it.
• It is not a Standards & Conformance flag. Nothing about this row reflects certification status, audit findings, or brand-standard compliance. See Standards & Conformance for that separate surface.

Put together: Needs Attention is Verinode's own read of who isn't getting value from the platform yet, generated the same way every other Impact number is, from that franchisee's own usage data. It carries no disciplinary weight and triggers no automated consequence. The right response to a franchisee appearing here is a phone call or a coaching conversation, not a compliance write-up. That's the whole design intent behind the row: catch disengagement early enough that it's still a conversation, not a problem.

1. 1Open Impact from the sidebar and scroll to Needs Attention.
2. 2Read the sub-line on each tile first: a franchisee with "No IQ activity this window" needs a different conversation than one with "6 of 14 decisions acted," the first hasn't started, the second has started but isn't following through.
3. 3Use the marker chart to gauge how far off pace a franchisee is running relative to the reference point, not just whether it's flagged at all.
4. 4Click through to that franchisee's directory profile before you call, so you're going in with its fuller standing, not just the one engagement number.
5. 5Treat this as an outreach list, not a scorecard. A franchisee dropping off this row next month because it re-engaged is the outcome the row is built to produce.

Related reading

• Impact: the network's return on Verinode, how Needs Attention fits alongside the hero, Value Captured, and Engagement.
• The network impact hero, the decisions-acted, recovered, potential, and action-rate numbers this row breaks down by franchisee.
• The interventions queue for at-risk locations, the human-flagged list this row is deliberately not.
• The office leaderboard and composite ranking, the benchmark-based ranking behind the Watchlist, a different signal from engagement.
• What HQ sees: the network privacy boundary, the trust model behind every aggregate on this page.
• The location directory, where every tile in this row sends you when you click through.

Data sources