How the Staff Leaderboard works (and how it scores people)
The Staff Leaderboard shows you who your customers are praising, with a score for each team member built from the reviews credited to them. This article explains exactly how a review gets credited to a person, how the score is worked out, and why the board will sometimes show a dash instead of a number.
One principle drives all of it: the board never shows a number it cannot back up with real reviews. A wrong score about a named colleague causes arguments in the lunchroom, so wherever Cloutly is not sure, it says so rather than guessing.
How a review gets credited to a person
When a review comes in, Cloutly tries to work out who on your team it belongs to. There are two kinds of credit:
Verified — Cloutly knows who did the work. This happens when your booking system (Mindbody, Zenoti and similar) told us which staff member served that customer, when the customer used a team member's personal review link, or when you assigned the review to someone yourself. Verified credit is certain, so it carries the most weight.
Mentioned by name — the review itself says the name: "Sarah was amazing!" If exactly one Sarah works at that location, she gets the credit. This is a confident guess rather than a certainty, and the board treats it that way.
If a review says "Sarah" and you have two Sarahs, Cloutly refuses to guess. The review goes into the needs attributing list at the top of the board instead, where you can assign it with one click. A wrong credit is worse than a missing one — a missing one you can fix, a wrong one just sits there looking true.
Your decisions always win. When you assign a review to someone, that assignment is permanent: the nightly re-scan never overwrites it, even if the automatic matching would have picked someone else.
Which reviews count toward the score
Verified reviews always count. If your booking system credits ten reviews to someone, those ten are in their score from day one — certainty is never worth less than guessing.
Name mentions fill the gaps. While some of your team only have name-matched reviews, everyone is scored on their full record — verified and mentioned together — and a banner above the board says name matching is in play. Once every scoreable person has verified reviews of their own, the board quietly switches to verified only and name matching stops counting: at that point it adds nothing, and dropping it removes the last bit of guesswork. Nobody loses a score when that switch happens — by then, everyone it ranks is already on the board.
How the score is calculated
Every score starts at your team average and moves toward the person's own average as their reviews come in. The exact formula is on every team member's page, and you can check it by hand:
score = (team average × 5 + their star ratings added up) ÷ (5 + their number of rated reviews)
The "× 5" is the stabiliser. It means one review can never launch someone to the top or drop them to the bottom — a person's own results take over gradually, carrying half the weight once they have five rated reviews of their own.
A worked example
Say your team average is 4.8.
Priya just got her first review — a 5-star. Her score is (4.8 × 5 + 5) ÷ 6 = 4.83. Barely above the team average, with an Early days tag so nobody over-reads one review.
Marcus has ten 5-star reviews. His score is (4.8 × 5 + 50) ÷ 15 = 4.93. Same perfect rating as Priya — but ten reviews of proof moves him well clear.
Jess has nine 5-stars and one 1-star. Her score is (4.8 × 5 + 46) ÷ 15 = 4.67. The bad review counts — but one rough day doesn't erase nine great ones.
That is the whole system: volume matters, consistency matters, and no single review decides anything.
Why some people show a dash instead of a score
A score with nothing behind it would be a made-up number, so the board simply doesn't show one. Team members without a scoreable review yet are still listed — below the ranked rows, with an honest note about where they stand:
"No reviews yet" — nothing has been credited to them in the selected period.
"No rating to rank on yet" — they have credited reviews, but none carry a star rating (video testimonials and direct feedback often don't).
Nobody is hidden, and nobody is padded. If a teammate seems stuck without a score, the fastest fixes are giving them a personal review link to share, or assigning their reviews from the needs attributing list.
Ties are real ties
Two people with identical results share the same position — you will see two number 2s rather than the alphabet quietly deciding who "won". A tied top spot means exactly what it says: joint first.
A few practical notes
The date range matters. The board scores the period you have selected (90 days by default), so it reflects recent form rather than all of history. Someone brilliant last year but absent this quarter will show it.
Ratings of 2 stars and below count as negative in the summaries; 0-star entries mean the customer left no rating at all, and those never affect anyone's score.
The location picker scopes everything. Pick one location and both the scores and the credits are limited to it.
Scores can move without new reviews — the team average is part of everyone's score, so a strong new review for one person nudges the baseline for all. Big swings, though, only ever come from someone's own reviews.
Getting the most from it
Clear the needs attributing list once a week — every review you assign makes the board more accurate, and your assignments are permanent.
Give each team member their personal review link or QR code. Reviews that arrive through it are verified automatically, which is the strongest credit there is.
Read the Early days tag as it is meant: promising, not proven. Praise publicly, judge slowly.