A question frequently asked by MemberShoppers users is
“How are the scores calculated for each of the categories, i.e., Tangibles, Reliability and Accuracy, etc.? When I add the total for each item in the category and divide by the number of items in that category, I get a different number.”
The reason a simple average of category factor scores does not always match the category average you see on your MemberShoppers report, is because not all questions are answered by every shopper on every shop form. Here’s an example of how MemberShoppers is programmed to calculate the score for the Tangibles category.
Let’s take a hypothetical coach named Janet Adams. She has a total of four employees she is coaching. So, from the entire pool of data that we have, we pull all shops done for these four employees between September 2 and October 2. It is from this pool of data that we use to calculate everything and generate this report.
From that pool of data, there were two shops completed.
The Tangibles column takes into account three questions:
- To what extent did the employee who served you appear professional? (Well-groomed and professionally dressed in business attire or CU logo wear)
- To what extent was the employee who served you professional? (Employee did not chew gum, eat, drink, or show excessive/inappropriate socializing with you or others.)
- To what extent was the work area of the employee who served you look professional? (Free of clutter and food/drink)
Using this example, Janet’s employees got the following scores:
QUESTION 1: 5, 1
QUESTION 2: 5, 1
QUESTION 3: 5, 5
So, the sum of all the scores is 22. Since it takes six questions into account (3 from each shop), we divide it by 6. 22/6 = 3.66667 Rounded to two decimal places, it’s 3.67.
Now, here’s where it gets tricky. Not every shop takes every question into consideration. For example, Bill Johnson, the call center coach, had nine shops for his employees, but they were all telephone shops that didn’t take into account Question 1 (professional appearance) or Question 3 (clean work area).
So, in his case:
QUESTION 1: N/A
QUESTION 2: 5, 5, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5
QUESTION 3: N/A
TOTAL: 44
And since it takes nine questions into account, we divide by nine. 44/9 = 4.888889 or 4.89
On the bottom line of the Executive Report, the total score is the total number of points divided by the number of questions–not the number of shops. If Janet and Bill were the only two coaches, the bottom line for Tangibles would be 11 shops with a score of 4.40 (44 + 22) / (6 + 9) = 66/15 = 4.40.
