Understanding your metrics

Numbers are only useful if you know what they’d make you do differently. Here’s what each one means and what it’s good for.

Response volume

How much feedback you’ve collected in the period, broken down by channel.

What it’s for: confirming you have enough data to trust the rest. Ten responses is an anecdote. A hundred is a signal.

Watch for: a sudden drop, which usually means a broken connection or a survey that stopped sending rather than customers going quiet.

Sentiment breakdown

Your feedback split into positive, neutral and negative.

What it’s for: the fastest read on how things are going.

Watch for: the trend, not the absolute number. Every business has a baseline negative rate. Yours moving from 8% to 15% is the finding; being at 8% in the first place isn’t.

→ How sentiment analysis works

Sentiment over time

The same split, charted.

What it’s for: connecting changes in feedback to changes in the business. A dip that starts the week you changed suppliers, or lost a chef, or altered opening hours, is the most actionable thing on the dashboard.

Watch for: seasonality. Compare against the same period last year where you can, not just last month.

Resolution rate

Of the resolutions opened, how many were resolved, are pending, or went unresolved.

What it’s for: knowing whether your recovery attempts are working.

Watch for: a rising unresolved rate. That usually means one of three things — the problems are too serious to fix with a message, the tone is wrong, or you’re offering something people don’t want. All three are fixable, but only if you look.

Actions used

How much of your monthly allowance the agent has consumed.

What it’s for: capacity planning. If you’re consistently hitting the ceiling mid-month, the agent is doing more work than your plan covers.

→ Understanding actions and limits

Themes

The topics coming up repeatedly in open-text answers and reviews, split into what customers praise and what they complain about.

What it’s for: this is usually the most valuable panel on the page. Individual complaints are noise; the same complaint fifteen times is a business problem with a name.

Watch for: things you can’t see from inside. Staff know about the slow kitchen. Nobody internally notices that the signage is confusing, because they all know where everything is.

Which numbers actually matter

If you only look at two things:

1. Sentiment trend — is it getting better or worse?
2. Negative themes — what’s the most common complaint?

Everything else is supporting detail. Those two, checked weekly, will tell you almost everything the dashboard can tell you.