Rating an entity

Why your rating matters

Every peer number in the Ratings tab exists because operators like you rated the thing. A rating is the smallest, fastest contribution you can make to the network, and it is one of the most useful: it turns a vendor or a piece of gear from a name into a signal the whole network can act on, and it earns you the peer read back in return.

Verinode is an independent data trust. When you rate an entity, that rating writes to your own private record first, and then, with consent, anonymizes through to the shared peer layer. It is never sold to carriers. This article covers how to leave a rating, what you are actually rating, how team ratings work, and what you get back for contributing.

Leaving a rating: the fastest path

The quickest way to rate is right inside the Ratings tab. Drill into a vendor category (Software or Services) and look at the Team Rating column. For any vendor you have not rated yet, that column shows an inline five-star picker instead of a number.

1. 1Open Benchmarks from the sidebar under Intelligence and pick the Ratings tab.
2. 2Drill into the category holding the vendor: click the entity-type tile, then the category tile.
3. 3In the table, find the vendor's row and look at the Team Rating column.
4. 4Click a star, one to five, on the inline picker. That is the whole action.

The rating saves the moment you click, and the table refreshes so your new rating replaces the star picker. If a vendor is one you have not formally added to your stack yet, rating it quietly creates the relationship for you, so you never have to set a vendor up before you can weigh in on it. You can fill in cost, renewal, and switchability later on the Vendors page.

You can also rate a vendor the longer way, from the Vendors page, when you add or edit a vendor relationship. The satisfaction rating you set there flows to exactly the same place.

What you are rating

What a rating means depends on the kind of entity:

• Vendors (Software and Services) are rated on operator satisfaction, one to five. This is the everyday read: how well the tool or the service actually works for your operation.
• Equipment is rated on product satisfaction, one to five, the same way, for gear in your fleet.
• Processes are not star-rated. A process earns a LEAN score (0 to 100) calculated from your documented workflow, its step count, total minutes, and framework adherence (IICRC S500, S520, S770, and OSHA), which is why processes surface a score rather than a star picker.

How team ratings work

A single operator's opinion is a good start; your whole team's is better. Verinode keeps two levels of your own read on every vendor:

• Your headline rating, the one-to-five you set with the inline picker or on the Vendors page.
• Your team's average, built from survey responses across your team, with a count of how many people answered and, when the survey captured them, per-dimension scores, for example integration, support, and reliability, each with its own average.

In the Team Rating column, Verinode prefers the team average once it exists, falling back to your own headline rating when it does not. The subline tells you which you are looking at: "team of 6" for a team average, or "your rating" for your solo one, with a note like "· 3 dim" when dimension scores are attached. This is how a vendor read stops being one person's gut feel and becomes your organization's actual experience.

Where your rating goes, and how it stays anonymous

Your rating takes two paths at once:

• To your private record. It writes to your own vendor relationship, visible only to you and your team. This is your inside read and it never leaves your account in identifiable form.
• To the anonymized peer layer, with consent. Your rating is hashed to strip any identity, then written to the shared intelligence layer and folded into the running average for that entity. What surfaces to other operators is only ever the aggregate, the mean across everyone, with a count of distinct contributing operators. No individual rating is ever exposed, and no rating is ever sold to carriers.

The anonymization hop runs after your action and never blocks it: if the intelligence write hits a snag, your own rating still saves. A score only publishes to the peer cohort once enough separate operators have rated the same entity, which is the anonymity floor that keeps any one contributor from being singled out.

What you get back for contributing

This is the reciprocal deal at the heart of Verinode: every anonymized contribution returns something tangible to the contributor.

• You unlock the peer read. Contributing your ratings in a family of entities is one of the ways the peer numbers in that family come into focus for you. Rate the vendors in a category and the anonymized cohort read on that category unlocks, so the more you put in, the more of the network's collective experience you can see.
• You get your own team's read organized. Your headline and team ratings live together on every vendor, ready whenever you are weighing a renewal or a switch.
• You make the benchmarks more trustworthy. Each rating you add tightens the cohort behind a number, so the peer read you and everyone else relies on rests on more real businesses.

Getting the most from it

1. 1Rate the vendors and equipment you already use, straight from the inline picker in the Ratings tab, whenever you spot an empty Team Rating column.
2. 2For the vendors that matter most, send your team the survey so your read carries a team average and dimension scores, not just one opinion.
3. 3Revisit and re-rate when your experience with a vendor changes; the running average absorbs it.
4. 4Read the peer numbers you unlock alongside the Verinode Research Score and vendor spend before you commit to a switch.

Data sources