Vendor detail: Network team scores (what your operators say)

What this section is

Every vendor a franchisee brings on gets scored two different ways inside Verinode, and the vendor detail overlay is the one place HQ sees both side by side. One score comes from Verinode's research layer: the Verinode Score and its dimension breakdown, built independently from market reviews, security posture, adoption signals, and vendor trajectory, the same for every operator on the platform regardless of who uses that vendor. The other comes from your own network: the franchisees actually using this vendor rating it, dimension by dimension, through their own team on IQ.

Network team scores is that second view. It takes every active franchisee relationship with this vendor across your group, pulls each one's per-dimension ratings, and rolls them up into one median per dimension, so HQ can read "what our operators say" about a vendor next to "what the catalog says" about it, without ever seeing which specific franchisee said what.

This is not a second opinion competing with the Verinode Score. It is a genuinely different signal: the research layer tells you how a vendor is built and positioned in the market; Network team scores tells you how it is actually landing with the people using it day to day inside your own network. A vendor can score well on research and still be wearing thin with your franchisees on support responsiveness, or the reverse, a newer vendor the research layer hasn't fully caught up on yet can already be earning strong marks from the operators running it. Reading both together is the point.

Verinode surfaces this pattern. It does not decide anything about the vendor for you. HQ reads the two views side by side and decides whether a program conversation, a renegotiation, or nothing at all is the right next step.

Where to find it

Open Vendors from the HQ sidebar at hq.verinode.ai/vendors. Click any vendor tile, in any row on the page, to open its detail overlay. Network team scores sits inside that overlay, below the Verinode score breakdown and, when present, the "Also scored in" and "Sources & evidence" sections, and above the Programs row.

The section only renders at all once at least one dimension on this vendor has ratings on file from your network. If none of your franchisees have rated any dimension of this vendor yet, the whole section is simply omitted. There's no placeholder card and no "no ratings yet" banner here; the layout closes the gap and moves straight to Programs. This is different from an explicit empty state elsewhere on the page: it means the section hasn't started forming yet, not that something is broken.

You only reach this section at all once the vendor itself has cleared HQ's network-wide privacy floor. If a vendor is used by too few franchisees in your network to aggregate safely, the whole overlay opens to a single Aggregate-only view message instead of any of its sections, Network team scores included. See What HQ sees vs. what stays private for exactly how that floor works and why it exists before this section can ever appear.

The header line

At the top of the section, a label reads Network team scores, with a line of context to its right: "Aggregated from franchisee ratings · up to N raters." That N is not your total franchisee count and not the total number of active relationships with this vendor: it's the largest number of distinct raters behind any single dimension below. Franchisees don't necessarily rate every dimension of a vendor the same way, so one dimension might have a wider base of raters than another; this number tells you the widest base among them, not a network-wide total.

Reading a dimension row

Below the header, one row per dimension, each rendered as a flat bordered row rather than a card inside a card. Every row carries the same five pieces of information:

• A confidence dot on the left, colored by the confidence tier most commonly cited by the franchisees who rated that dimension: green for verified, copper for observed, yellow for reported, and gray for estimated. This color scale belongs to Network team scores specifically; the research-layer breakdown above it in the same overlay uses a related but not identical palette (see Vendor Detail: Score & Research and Score Composition for that one), so don't read the two dots as interchangeable at a glance.
• The dimension name, drawn from the label your franchisees' own ratings carried in when they scored it, using the same catalog of dimensions the research layer scores against (Market Trust, Peer Intelligence, Cost Position, Integration & Ecosystem, and the rest).
• A meta line underneath the name reading "weight NN," the dimension's relative importance in the vendor's overall scoring model as a whole-number percentage, followed by the rater count for that specific dimension ("N raters"), the modal confidence tier if one exists, and, when every rater excluded this dimension, the word "excluded" appended to the end.
• A score, right-aligned, when enough franchisees rated the dimension: the median score across every rater, to one decimal place, labeled "Network Median" underneath. The number itself is colored the same way as the research-layer bars: green at 4.0 and above, copper from 3.0 up to 4.0, yellow below 3.0.
• A status line instead of a number, right-aligned, when there isn't enough signal yet: either "Insufficient ratings" or "All raters excluded," covered next.

Rows are ordered with every dimension that has a real median or is simply under-rated listed first, heaviest weight first, and dimensions every rater excluded pushed to the bottom regardless of weight, dimmed to reduced opacity so they read as background information rather than something to act on.

"Insufficient ratings" vs. "All raters excluded"

These read similarly but mean different things, and the row's own opacity tells you which one you're looking at before you even read the label:

• "Insufficient ratings" (normal opacity) means at least one franchisee gave this dimension a real score, but not enough distinct franchisees have weighed in yet for Verinode to publish a median without risking that a single rater's number could be worked backward to a specific franchisee. The dimension is genuinely being rated; the network just hasn't reached the floor needed to show it safely. As more franchisees rate this vendor, this resolves itself with no action needed from HQ.
• "All raters excluded" (dimmed row) means every franchisee who rated this vendor marked this specific dimension as not applicable or not scorable for them, a genuine "no signal" rather than "not enough signal yet." A dimension that stays here across a large, mature rater base is a dimension nobody in your network can meaningfully speak to, not a privacy gap waiting to close.

This is the same K-anonymity discipline applied everywhere else HQ aggregates franchisee-level data, just enforced one level deeper than the vendor itself: a vendor can clear the network-wide privacy floor and still have individual dimensions sitting below their own rating floor, because different franchisees rate different dimensions of the same vendor at different rates. The floor is a minimum number of distinct raters, deliberately not disclosed as a specific count here or anywhere else HQ surfaces it, the same way the vendor-level floor described in the privacy boundary article is never quoted as a bare number either.

How it complements the research-layer breakdown

Directly above Network team scores in the same overlay, when a score has been computed, sits the Verinode score breakdown: the research-layer dimension scores behind this vendor's Verinode Score, the identical breakdown IQ operators see on their own vendor cards, drawn from Verinode's shared research catalog and completely independent of any one operator's opinion. Reading the two together is the whole point of putting them in the same overlay:

• The Verinode score breakdown answers "what does the catalog say about this vendor," the same for every operator on the platform, built from public market signal, security posture, and vendor trajectory.
• Network team scores answers "what does our network say about this vendor," built entirely from your own franchisees' lived experience running it.

A dimension can diverge between the two views in either direction, and both directions are useful. A vendor scoring strong on the research layer's Risk & Compliance dimension but weak on your network's own equivalent rating is worth a closer look, your franchisees may be seeing something in practice, a support gap, an onboarding friction, that a market-facing research signal wouldn't catch. The reverse, a vendor the research layer marks down for thin public signal but that your own network rates consistently well, is often just a smaller or newer vendor your franchisees have more first-hand experience with than the wider market does yet.

Neither view overrides the other. They sit next to each other precisely so a franchisor can weigh both before deciding whether a vendor belongs on a program, needs a renegotiation conversation, or is worth flagging for franchisees who haven't adopted it yet.

The privacy mechanics behind this section

Network team scores is the one place inside HQ with a documented, narrow exception to the platform's rule that HQ never reads franchisee-level business data directly: a server action reads each franchisee's own dimension ratings from the operator side of the platform, buckets them by dimension, and returns only a median, a rater count, and a modal confidence label. No individual franchisee's rating, and no franchisee's private overall "team rating" of the vendor, ever leaves that computation. The full mechanics, and exactly why this carve-out is safe rather than a gap, are covered in What HQ sees vs. what stays private.

How to use this section

1. 1Open a vendor from any row on the Vendors page and scroll to Network team scores. If the section isn't there at all, your network hasn't rated any dimension of this vendor yet, there's nothing to read into that.
2. 2Compare it against the Verinode score breakdown directly above it. Look for dimensions where the two disagree, that's where your network's lived experience is telling you something the research layer either hasn't caught yet or is weighing differently than your franchisees are.
3. 3Weight your read by rater count, not just the median. A 4.2 median from a wide rater base is a much stronger signal than the same 4.2 from a dimension sitting right at "Insufficient ratings" a moment ago.
4. 4Treat "All raters excluded" dimensions as background, not a gap to chase. If a dimension stays excluded across a mature rater base, it means the dimension genuinely doesn't apply to how your network uses this vendor.
5. 5Use a low network median alongside a strong research score, or the reverse, as the trigger for a franchisee conversation before you touch the vendor's program status. The gap between the two views is usually the most useful thing on this page.

Best-practice example

Say a mitigation-equipment vendor shows a Verinode Score of 7.6 on the research layer, with Risk & Compliance and Vendor Trajectory both scoring strong. Scrolling to Network team scores, the same vendor's network median on Operational Fit sits at 2.8, colored yellow, with a wide rater base behind it, while Cost Position reads "All raters excluded" because your franchisees uniformly don't negotiate pricing directly with this vendor. Read together: a financially solid, well-regarded vendor in the wider market that your own network is finding genuinely hard to work with day to day. That's worth a franchisee call before a renegotiation conversation, the friction here is operational, not a pricing problem the Rate Drift row on the main Vendors page would have caught.

Related reading

• Vendors: your network's spend and procurement leverage, in aggregate: the full page this detail overlay opens from
• What HQ sees vs. what stays private: the full privacy boundary, including the documented PII-read carve-out this section relies on
• Comparing vendors across your network: the side-by-side compare panel, also opened from this overlay
• Vendor Detail: Score & Research and Score Composition: the research-layer dimension breakdown this section sits beside, as seen on the IQ side
• Programs: where preferred-vendor programs and qualification tiers, shown just below this section in the same overlay, are defined

Data sources