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Each quarter, Olo launches a wave of product enhancements to help restaurant brands provide guests with superior hospitality and do more with less. During this year’s Summer Release Event, we unveiled 10 new features across our three product suites: Order, Pay, and Engage.
Here’s a breakdown of our four most significant enhancements—how they work, why they matter, and who benefits.
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Card-Present Payments Via Kiosk
What it is: A fully branded, self-service kiosk that enables restaurants to accept card-present payments through Olo Pay
How it works: Kiosks will use Olo’s ordering API coupled with Olo Pay.
Guests can order through a kiosk with a digital menu. To check out, they can insert, swipe, or tap to pay through an attached payment terminal, which will accept major credit and debit cards and digital wallets. Guests can then choose to receive a text with their projected wait time and another when their order is ready.
All card-present reports will be accessible directly through the Olo Dashboard, making payment management easier and more efficient than ever.
Why it matters: Olo Pay now brings all payments—card-present and card-not-present—onto one unified platform for streamlined management.
How restaurants benefit: By leveraging self-service kiosks with Olo Pay, brands can combat labor challenges, boost ticket size through machine learning, process more orders digitally, and gain a deeper understanding of guests’ behavior. This expansion into card-present payments also simplifies reconciliation, refunding, and voiding processes.
How guests benefit: Self-service kiosks provide guests with a seamless and intuitive ordering and checkout experience that doesn’t require interaction with an employee.
Borderless/Loyalty Linking
What it is: Borderless integration with loyalty partners on Serve
How it works: Guests can sign in with their Borderless account or their loyalty account and reap the benefits of both.
If they sign in with Borderless, guests can earn and use loyalty rewards with their order, as indicated on the checkout page. Alternatively, if they sign in to their loyalty account instead of Borderless, all of their payment, contact, and delivery information will already be saved on file so
they don’t have to re-enter it.
Why it matters: Previously, Borderless could be enabled alongside loyalty sign-in. This meant guests had to choose to sign in with Borderless or through their loyalty account. As a result, guests could only experience the benefits of one or the other. Now, they get the best of both worlds.
How restaurants benefit: Brands can offer an elevated and frictionless guest experience that boosts loyalty program participation and guest satisfaction.
How guests benefit: Guests can earn and redeem loyalty rewards while enjoying the passwordless login and accelerated checkout experience provided by Borderless. Additionally, guests who sign into their loyalty account can have their delivery address and payment details pre-filled from their Borderless account.
OrderReady AI
What it is: Machine-learning-based, predictive capacity management
How it works: Our predictive quoting model ingests current capacity and detailed check data in real-time to generate highly accurate ready-time predictions for use in the ordering flow.
Why it matters: Restaurant brands need to quote accurate order-ready times to their guests and delivery service providers. Our models achieved a quoting accuracy improvement of 20% compared to legacy quoting logic.
How restaurants benefit: Brands can satisfy guest and partner expectations around timing, maintain food quality, and optimize restaurant operations. Additionally, this feature eliminates the need for manual inputs, guesswork, and ongoing management.
How guests benefit: Guests know exactly when to pick up their food so it’s fresh and they’ll spend less time waiting, which increases satisfaction.
Automated Guest Refunds in Dispatch
What it is: Automatic refund process in Dispatch for failed third-party deliveries
How it works: Olo will automatically refund the guest if the following criteria are satisfied: the guest never received their order, the delivery was canceled due to DSPOtherReason, or the DSP has refunded the brand for the delivery.
Why it matters: The majority of refunds DSPs issue to brands are not passed through to the guest. Guests who are not reimbursed for canceled deliveries have a poor experience and are less likely to order from the same brand again.
How restaurants benefit: This new feature reduces manual work for operators and helps recover guests by automatically issuing a refund if the guest never received their order and the DSP has provided a full credit to the restaurant.
How guests benefit: Guests are quickly refunded after failed third-party deliveries.
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Check out our quarterly release page for more information about these and other recent product enhancements.
Olo customers can reach out to their CSM to learn more about new features and how to take advantage of them. Not using Olo yet? Contact our team to start a conversation.
