How uRate's Satisfaction Score Works — and Why It Isn't a Star Average

If you've ever left a five-star review for a company minutes after a good phone call, only to have a completely different experience the next time you needed help, you've already found the problem with star ratings: they capture a mood, not an outcome. uRate measures something different — what actually happened when you had a problem, and how it ended.

A star rating asks one vague question: how do you feel about this company? uRate asks four specific ones, and only after your case has actually gone through its full journey — filed, responded to, and rated:

• Did they reply? (Response Rate, 20% of the score)
• How satisfied were you? (Consumer Rating, 30%)
• Was it fixed? (Resolution Rate, 30%)
• Would you go back? (Would Buy Again, 20%)

Each answer feeds a public, published formula — the same one behind the "How a company earns its score" calculator on the site. Nothing about it is hidden or company-specific; every business is scored the same way, on the same four questions.

Resolution Rate and Consumer Rating each carry 30% of the total, more than Response Rate or Would Buy Again. That weighting is deliberate. A company can reply fast and still not solve anything, and a company can eventually fix the problem after making you feel terrible about it along the way — the score is built so that both halves matter, and neither one alone can carry a good result. A company that answers quickly but rarely actually resolves anything doesn't score well just for being responsive.

There's one hard rule that overrides everything else: a company that responds to fewer than half of its complaints is automatically classified as "Not Recommended," no matter how good its other numbers look. You can't average your way out of ignoring people.

Take a fictional telco — call it Kopi Telco. It responds to 90% of complaints, averages a 7.5 out of 10 on the satisfaction question, resolves 80% of complaints, and 70% of consumers say they'd buy from it again. Run those four numbers through the weighted formula and Kopi Telco lands at 7.85, shown on uRate as 7.8 — a "Good" rating. Change any one input meaningfully — say, resolution rate drops to 40% — and the same company falls into a different band, even if its satisfaction score stayed the same. The score moves with real outcomes, not with sentiment alone.

Not every complaint filed on uRate counts toward a company's score — only the ones that finished the full loop: filed, responded to, and rated by the consumer who filed it. This matters for two reasons. First, it means a company can't be dragged down by a case that's still open and unresolved — that case simply hasn't finished its journey yet, so it isn't counted either way until it does. Second, it means a determined pile-on of one-off ratings from people who never actually filed and completed a real case can't move the number. The score reflects people who went through the process, not people who showed up to leave a star.

A company with fewer than 10 evaluated complaints doesn't get a score at all — it shows as "Reputation forming" instead of a number. That's a small sample warning, not a bad grade: it tells you there simply isn't enough data yet to be a fair signal, the same way you wouldn't trust a restaurant's rating after two reviews.

A star average tells you how people felt on their way out the door. uRate's score tells you what happened, whether it actually got fixed, and whether the person who lived through it would go back — recalculated every time a new case closes the loop, and impossible to inflate just by being polite.