Program targets on reputation metrics

What this is

A network program target is a single threshold your network declares on one reputation metric, for example "Google rating should sit at or above 4.5 stars" or "composite score should sit at or above 75." Once that target is active, every franchisee's Reputation detail slider picks it up automatically: the matching metric tile grows a small ✓ Meets target or ✗ Below target tag underneath its peer-comparison line, so a franchisee's public standing reads against a network standard, not only against its peers.

This is one target, network-wide, per metric, set once from Programs, and read everywhere that metric appears on a franchisee's Reputation card. You do not set a target per franchisee; you set it once for the whole network, and every franchisee's own number is checked against it.

Targets are optional. A network that has never opened Programs and declared one still sees every Reputation tile working normally: composite score, star ratings, review counts, peer medians, percentiles, and delta labels all compute the same way. There is simply no ✓/✗ tag on top. See The franchisee reputation drill-in for the rest of what that slider shows; this article is only about the target tag layered on top of it.

Where to find it

Two different places matter here, one for setting the target, one for seeing its effect.

Setting a target: Programs. Open Programs from the HQ sidebar, or go to hq.verinode.ai/programs. The Programs page lists your network's programs across three rows, Active, Drafts, and Sunset. Click into any active program, one of Vendor Approval, Carrier, TPA, Cert Mandate, Training, Brand Standard, or Safety, to open its detail page. (Marketing Co-op programs use a separate ledger-style detail page and don't carry a network target.) A network target on a reputation metric doesn't have to live on a "reputation" program by name, it lives on whichever program your network chose to own it, a brand-standard program is a common home for one.

Seeing the effect: Reputation. Open Reputation from the sidebar (it lives in the Revenue group), or go to hq.verinode.ai/reputation. Click any franchisee tile in the Below Threshold, Declining Trend, Top Performers, or Most Reviewed row to open that franchisee's detail slider. The target tag, when one is active, sits under the peer-comparison line on the relevant tile inside the Composite reputation and Per platform sections.

Declaring a target from a program

On a program's detail page, a Network target row sits alongside the program's other authoring rows (approved parties, enrollments, audits, violations, depending on the program type). If no target is declared yet, an admin sees a tile reading:

+ Declare a network target Pick a section metric + value + direction. Compliance ✓/✗ tags appear on each franchisee's slider tile.

Clicking it opens the Network target modal:

1. 1Metric. A dropdown grouped by section, Facilities, Fleet, Equipment, Commercial, Reputation, so you're picking from the full registry of metrics that can carry a target, not just Reputation ones. The Reputation group, listed last, offers five metrics: Reputation composite score, Google rating, Google review count, Yelp rating, and Yelp review count. Once you pick one, the modal shows "Stored as [unit]. Default direction: Higher is better" underneath, so you know what to type into the value field next. All five reputation metrics default to "higher is better," since more stars and more reviews both read as healthier standing.
2. 2Target value. A number input labeled "Target value ([unit])," for example "Target value (stars 0-5)" for a rating or "Target value (count)" for a review count. Type the raw number in that unit.
3. 3Direction. Either Higher meets (≥ target) or Lower meets (≤ target). Picking a metric pre-selects "higher meets" for every reputation metric, but you can override it if your network wants the opposite reading for some reason.
4. 4Grace days. A non-negative integer, defaulting to 0, with the hint "Days a newly-enrolled franchisee has before compliance is evaluated. 0 = evaluate immediately." This value is stored with the target and echoed on the program's own target summary tile once saved.
5. 5Save. The button stays disabled until a metric and a value are both filled in. While saving it reads "Saving…". Saving writes the threshold onto the program itself, there is nothing further to configure per franchisee.

If a target is already set, the same modal opens pre-filled, with an added Clear target button that removes the threshold entirely (every franchisee's tag for that metric disappears the moment you clear it).

Once saved, the program's own Network target row shows a summary tile: a label reading "Reputation target," a headline like "≥ 4.5 ★" or "≥ 75.0," a sub-line naming the metric and grace period (for example "Google rating · 30d grace"), and a meta line reading "Franchisees meet at or above" or "Franchisees meet at or below" depending on direction. Admins also see an Edit target tile beside it to change the metric, value, direction, or grace days, or to clear it.

Which reputation tiles carry the tag

All five metrics in the Reputation group are wired to show a target tag, matching all five options in the modal:

• Composite score (composite_score)
• Google rating (google_rating)
• Google reviews (google_review_count)
• Yelp rating (yelp_rating)
• Yelp reviews (yelp_review_count)

Unlike some other sections, where a metric can be selectable in the modal without a matching tile tag, every reputation metric that can carry a target actually shows one on the slider once it's active. The one exception is the BBB rating tile beside Composite score: it has no peer comparison at all (a letter grade isn't a comparable numeric scale) and it isn't in the target registry, so it never carries a ✓/✗ tag under any circumstance.

The tag reads "✓ Meets target" in green or "✗ Below target" in red, followed by a muted "(target [value])" note showing the threshold in the same formatted units the tile itself uses, a star figure, a plain count, or a plain decimal for composite score. Hovering the tag shows a tooltip naming the program the target came from, so anyone looking at a franchisee's card can trace the standard back to its source.

How meets or below is resolved

For each of the five tagged tiles, on every franchisee's Reputation slider, Verinode:

1. Reads every active program in your network (status = Active; Draft and Sunset programs never contribute a target, even if one is saved on them) that has a target declared, and keys those thresholds by metric.
2. If two active programs happen to declare a target on the same metric, the one activated most recently is the one that applies, the other is set aside. Verinode does not merge or average competing targets on one metric, so if your network runs more than one program that could plausibly own a reputation metric, only one admin's threshold should be the one left active at a time.
3. For the franchisee's raw value on that metric, checks whether a target applies at all. No active target on that metric, no tag, full stop.
4. If a target applies and the franchisee has a real value on file for that metric, compares the two: "higher meets" direction reads as meets when the franchisee's value is at or above the target; "lower meets" reads as meets when the franchisee's value is at or below the target. Anything on the wrong side of that line reads as below target.
5. If the franchisee has no value on file for that metric, for example no Yelp rating because the office has never connected a Yelp listing, no tag renders, there's nothing to compare, even if a target is active on that metric.

This resolution is independent of the Group / Regional / National scope switcher on the slider. Toggling scope recomputes the peer median and percentile shown beside a tile, but the target tag itself doesn't move, it's always checked against the one network threshold, not against whichever peer cohort happens to be selected. It's also independent of the delta line's own color logic: the "+N% vs median" or "-N% vs median" delta above the tag is colored using a fixed "higher is better" reading for every reputation metric, regardless of whatever direction an admin chose for the network target itself. If your network deliberately set a "lower meets" target on a reputation metric (an unusual override), the peer-delta color and the target tag can, in principle, point in different directions on the same tile. Read them as two separate lines: the delta is "how do you compare to peers," the tag is "do you clear the standard the network declared."

How reputation metrics render with no target set

A Reputation tile with no target tag is not missing data and not an error state. Nothing under the peer-comparison line changes at all, no dash, no placeholder, no "no target" label, the tile simply ends after the delta line (or after "Cohort too small" / "Pending benchmark seed" when there's no peer median either). This is the ordinary look of every reputation tile until your network declares a target, and it means one of two ordinary things: either your network has never declared an active target on that particular metric, or the target that used to apply was cleared or its owning program moved out of Active status.

Verinode doesn't invent a placeholder threshold to fill that space. An untagged tile is exactly as informative as a tagged one, it's simply not being measured against a network standard right now. If you're not seeing a tag you expect, check three things in order: the owning program's status is Active (not Draft or Sunset), the target hasn't been cleared, and the franchisee actually has a value on file for that metric (a disconnected Yelp listing, for example, has nothing for a Yelp target to compare against).

Best-practice example

Say your network's Brand Standard program declares a target of ≥ 4.5 ★ on Google rating, direction "higher meets," with no grace period, from Programs. Every franchisee's Reputation slider immediately starts showing "✓ Meets target (target 4.5 ★)" or "✗ Below target (target 4.5 ★)" under the Google rating tile's peer-comparison line, in green or red respectively. A franchisee running a 4.2 Google rating, sitting comfortably above its own Group median of 3.9, still reads "✗ Below target," because the tag checks against the network standard, not against peers. Open the same franchisee's card and its Yelp rating tile carries no tag at all, because your network never set a target on Yelp rating, that tile just shows the ordinary peer comparison. If your network later also wants a composite-score bar, remember to enter it on the 0-100 scale the slider actually uses (for example "75"), not the 0-5 scale the modal's storage hint implies.

Related reading

• The franchisee reputation drill-in, the full slider this target tag lives on, including the header, the three sections, and the privacy boundary.
• Reputation: network review health at a glance, the board and the four rows that open the slider.
• The network reputation hero, how the composite score is built on its 0-100 scale, referenced in the scale-mismatch warning above.
• Network targets: setting a threshold that tags franchisee sliders, the general mechanics of network targets shared across Facilities, Fleet, Equipment, Commercial, and Reputation.
• Programs: how HQ codifies what the network adopts, the catalog page every program, including the one that owns your reputation target, lives in.
• Compliance across the network, where this same composite score feeds a separate Brand Health hero with its own cut lines.

Data sources