2023 Fall Release
The latest Olo enhancements enabling restaurants to acquire and retain more guests
In this 14-minute video, you can get a firsthand look at key enhancements released over the last quarter and see how they work in practice for you and your teams.
At Olo, we’re constantly innovating to achieve our vision of the restaurant of the future and release platform-level enhancements that unlock immediate value across our customer base. This quarter’s updates cover each of Olo’s Order, Pay, and Engage suites, and we’re excited to see how they help customers win more guests, improve operations, and drive guest lifetime value.
We hope you’ll take some time to learn more about what’s available to Olo customers—either by reading the details on this page, reviewing our press release, or by watching the release video to see the tools in action. There’s a lot of new value to take in, and we look forward to sharing even more in 2024!
New Features Released in Q3 2023
Catering+ With House Account Feature
Market demand for catering services is at an all-time high, and the channel is predicted to be a major revenue generator for brands positioned to capitalize. Olo’s Catering+ is an enterprise-grade solution that integrates seamlessly with customers’ existing mealtime ordering platforms, offering a robust ordering engine and seamless order management. In addition, customers now have the ability to create House Accounts—essentially a line of credit for highly valuable guests—to give repeat catering guests flexibility in payment options. House Accounts are just the first of several planned Catering-specific enhancements we’re building for the Catering+ Olo offering.
Enhanced Sentiment Module
Designed specifically for multi-location restaurant brands, Olo’s enhanced Sentiment module offers an intuitive user experience and more powerful reporting capabilities, which empower teams to monitor and engage with guest feedback across rating and review platforms as well as guest surveys at scale. Brands can leverage robust sentiment analysis and actionable insights to foster brand loyalty, win back unhappy guests, and turn review sites into reliable acquisition channels.
Marketing AI Creative Assistant
AI continues to reshape how restaurants execute their marketing and operations, and one way in particular they can leverage generative AI is to create engaging content at scale. Customers using Olo Marketing can reduce the amount of time it takes to go from idea to execution by using starter AI prompts to quickly generate engaging copy within the Email Design Editor. Teams can then easily refine suggested copy in the conversational interface to tweak the tone, length, and styling to match your brand voice.
Order with Google
Olo’s Network integrates seamlessly with Order with Google, allowing brands to enable ordering directly from the Google search results page when searching for restaurants. In addition to improving conversion rates by offering a seamless user experience to guests, brands benefit by retaining control of the guest data for analysis and future marketing to guests who have opted in.
Dynamic Pricing
Brands can dynamically update separate pricing for direct delivery orders based on specific menu items and/or locations using Olo’s ordering API for applications designed by a custom front-end developer as well as through Olo’s white-label ordering interface, Serve. Delivery prices can be managed in the POS system, or—if a brand uses a POS application that does not have such native functionality or simply wishes to manage delivery prices in Olo directly—can configure the delivery price markup in the Olo Dashboard.
Olo Pay Automated Dispute Response
Olo Pay's Automated Dispute Response feature activates just before dispute deadlines, automatically responding to certain disputes that have not been addressed by our customers. Leveraging Olo's internal ordering data, this feature aims to boost chargeback response and win rates while simultaneously eliminating the need for any manual intervention.
Olo Pay Itemized Payout Reports
Our new Itemized Payout Report provides a full snapshot of all activity impacting the deposit amount—including sales, refunds, chargebacks, and fees—ensuring accounting teams have all the details needed for reconciliation.
Content Management System (CMS) for Serve
Customers can now easily manage the ordering experience by making updates to Olo’s white-label ordering solution without enlisting the help of Olo’s support team. Available within the Olo Dashboard, the new content management system allows users to update images and preview changes across screen types before publishing.
Rails Marketplace-Specific Controls
To provide greater control and flexibility in managing third-party delivery orders, Olo has updated its Rails module to allow users to disable individual marketplaces or pause all Rails orders through our Ops API as well as the Olo Dashboard. With the ability to deactivate Rails ordering on a per-marketplace basis, teams can be more agile in addressing outages, solving operational challenges linked to labor issues or high order volumes, and resolving issues related to POS and/or menu ingestion.
Olo Dashboard Self-Service Auditing Tool
Brands now have more oversight into the usage of the Olo platform with the ability to view setting changes without reaching out to the Olo support team. The self-service auditing tool within the Dashboard improves operational efficiency by empowering corporate users to view details on any location-level changes made to operational information like store hours, fraud settings, quote time overrides, and other settings.
Host Expanded Reservations
Host users can now customize the booking availability by setting time windows up to 6 hours on either side of the inputted time, providing greater flexibility in optimizing capacity management and increasing reservation bookings.
Ready to learn more?
If you’re already an Olo customer, reach out to your Customer Success Manager to learn more about these features. If you’re not using Olo yet, contact our team to start a conversation.