Olo is an open SaaS platform for restaurants that enables hospitality at various guest touchpoints. The platform supports approximately 76,000 restaurants and more than 600 brands, connecting them to over 300 technology partners and more than 85 million guests who transact over the Olo platform and process, on average, more than 2 million orders per day.
From its beginnings in 2005, Olo remains dedicated to helping clients navigate digital ordering and delivery, leverage customer data to inform strategies, and personalize the guest experience from start to finish.
Loyalty360 engaged Ray Gallagher, GM of Engage at Olo, to discuss using digital solutions to drive guest-centric hospitality, how personalization creates a better customer experience, and Olo’s commitment to offering an open platform.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself — your current role with Olo and your background?
Gallagher: I’m the GM of Engage at Olo and lead the product vision and strategy for the Engage product suite, including Guest Data Platform, Marketing, and Sentiment. Prior to my work at Olo, I was the VP of Customer Experience at Wisely, a customer intelligence platform acquired by Olo in November 2021. I spent the previous decade scaling and serving the Client Services teams at HotSchedules.
I’ve always had a passion for hospitality, growing up working in restaurants for over 13 years and building my way up from dishwasher to Sr. Director of Operations Services at Johnny Carino’s. Through my work at Olo, I’m thrilled to be playing a role in the industry’s digital transformation.
For those who may not be familiar with how Olo supports brands’ customer loyalty efforts, can you give us a brief overview of what you do, how you do it, and the industries you work with?
Gallagher: Olo is a mission-critical platform for the restaurant industry, helping operators drive sales, do more with less, and make every guest feel like a regular.
As part of the Engage product suite, Olo offers digital solutions to drive guest-centric hospitality, including its Guest Data Platform (GDP), Marketing, and Sentiment tools. Its GDP enables brands to collect, analyze, and act on guest data and make smarter business decisions, boost guest satisfaction, and accelerate revenue growth. Based on transactional, behavioral, demographic, and offline data for known and unknown guests, Olo’s GDP empowers operators to gain a deeper understanding of their guests and learn what drives acquisition, retention, frequency, and guest lifetime value.
Leveraging Marketing, brands can utilize this data and analysis to tailor their automated marketing and loyalty initiatives and ultimately build meaningful 1:1 guest relationships while strengthening opportunities for enhanced emotional loyalty. With powerful guest segmentation, multichannel campaign management, and automated guest journeys, Olo’s personalized marketing tools make it easy for operators to drive hospitality and long-term value.
Once their program is up and running, Olo’s Sentiment solution aggregates and analyzes any guest feedback, allowing operators to make corrective changes in real time to foster brand loyalty and win back unhappy guests.
Integration into legacy systems is a concern for brands when onboarding new technologies in support of their loyalty programs. Can you talk about how Olo approaches integration and what brands can expect?
Gallagher: Olo prides itself on remaining an open platform. We currently integrate with over 300 technology and service partners to help our restaurant customers keep pace with new solutions, such as loyalty programs, and easily expand their tech stacks with vetted partners.
Earlier this year, we launched Olo Connect as a testament to our open platform commitment. Olo Connect is a growing ecosystem of integrated technology and service partners — for example, Loyalty360 vendor member, Bounteous — demonstrating excellence across various categories, ensuring our customers have easy access to quick and reliable technologies that align well with their business models.
What do you think is working for your clients when it comes to building successful loyalty programs and strategies?
Gallagher: On average, 60% of restaurant revenue is driven by 20% of a restaurant’s guest base. Operators that successfully dial into these guests — the 20% that hold the most lifetime value for their brand — will win in the long run.
By leveraging tools such as Olo’s GDP, brands can identify guests with the most lifetime value and work in proven strategies and solutions, like Olo’s Marketing and Sentiment products, to help strengthen and replicate these relationships. This strategy works for our customers as they prioritize personalizing experiences, including communications, offers, and rewards for their most valuable guests, to foster long-term brand loyalty.
Personalization has become a key aspect of successful loyalty programs, and Olo provides a multichannel marketing platform specifically designed for restaurants. How can brands effectively leverage data and customer insights to create personalized experiences and strengthen customer loyalty? Can you provide some examples of what your clients have implemented?
Gallagher: With the right tools, such as Olo’s Engage suite, restaurant brands can effectively aggregate transactional, behavioral, demographic, and offline data for known and unknown guests from a range of sources, including POS, online ordering, loyalty programs, reservations, and more to build unified and comprehensive guest profiles. From there, operators can leverage these insights, such as their likes, dislikes, dietary restrictions, and preferred payment methods, to tailor every guest interaction and communication to their unique preferences and drive lifetime value. Equipped with this digital-enabled data and analysis, restaurant brands can personalize experiences on- and off-premise to enhance long-term guest loyalty.
Restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s uses Olo’s all-in-one restaurant GDP to analyze Guest Lifetime Value Data and make actionable marketing decisions. This is key to deepening relationships with their most valuable guests, providing a consistent experience on- and off-premise, and maximizing lifetime loyalty.
As customer expectations evolve and loyalty programs and strategies adapt, how do you envision the future of loyalty programs in your clients’ industries?
Gallagher: It’s not enough to run a generic loyalty program anymore. Restaurant brands must design marketing initiatives to prioritize growing guest lifetime value rather than foot traffic. With this in mind, loyalty programs will be data-driven and sophisticated, delivering deals, promotions, and communications that are personalized to their guests and foster hospitality, long-term sales, and order frequency.
Looking toward the future, what is the “next big thing” brands can expect in the way of technological opportunities and tools?
Gallagher: As brands continue to invest in digital, the trend is leaning towards guest-centric technology. As the industry becomes 100% digital, guest-centricity will take the forefront.
What is one piece of advice you would give to a brand that seeks to adapt and innovate its loyalty program, especially with regard to integrating new technologies? Are there any “quick wins” a brand could implement in its current programs?
Gallagher: The one piece of advice I would give to a brand looking to adapt its loyalty program is to make sure it’s integrated with an advanced Customer Data Platform (CDP). Loyalty programs can collect so much data, but it’s useless if operators aren’t retaining and analyzing it to better understand their guests.
With the right platform, the technology does most of the heavy lifting, and operators can rest easy knowing valuable data is being captured to inform tailored communicators and personalized offers and experiences. If programs take advantage of this, they are empowered to not only drive foot traffic but, more importantly, boost guest satisfaction, order frequency, and sales.
Are there other programs you admire / are loyal to from a customer loyalty perspective? What do you like about their offerings?
Gallagher: One of our customers, daytime dining concept First Watch, does a great job with their guest loyalty initiatives. In response to a growing portion of the brand’s same-store sales coming from its off-premise ordering options, First Watch looked to test winning marketing strategies aimed at keeping up its sales momentum by driving guests who ordered online to make a repeat order within a shorter-than-average guest frequency. Leveraging Olo’s marketing solutions combined with online ordering, POS, and payment processor integrations, First Watch created a hyper-targeted, behavior-based automated email campaign that determined the optimal timeframe in which to hit a guest’s inbox for conversion. As a result, First Watch experienced a 20% lift in spend by email recipients over 30 days, seeing a total of $2.7M spent by 48,000 email recipients within 90 days of launching the campaign.
Data-driven loyalty strategies such as this help set our customers apart from other brands in the space.
Do you have any closing advice or thoughts? What’s next for Olo as we near the end of the year and move into 2024?
Gallagher: As a member of team Olo, I’m proud to help our restaurant customers realize their digital potential and enrich hospitality at scale. We’re continuously innovating to meet the needs of our customers and are laser-focused on helping operators drive sales, do more with less, and make every guest feel like a regular. For example, last quarter, we incorporated generative AI into our Marketing product. Powered by Open AI and Chat GPT-4, our AI Assistant is available to help with content creation based on individual guest data and insights. With this recent enhancement, marketers now have more time to focus on sending powerful content to their guests to increase recency, frequency, and, ultimately, guest lifetime value.
We look forward to continuing to empower our restaurant customers to drive hospitality through our innovative product modules.