About Olo:

Olo is a New York City-based B2B SaaS company that develops digital ordering and delivery programs for restaurants. Olo’s mission is: “Give customers better, faster, and more personal service from the restaurants they love.” This is accomplished via providing holistic store logistics services, partnerships for 3rd party delivery service providers, and more.

Problem Overview:

Historically, a brand had countless manual hoops and many back-and-forth conversations to weather when attempting to open new franchised stores.

Information was exchanged via unprotected Excel spreadsheets and email threads; once successfully received in full, Olo’s internal CS department would review the submitted data for errors, inconsistencies, and outright misses before digging into logistical next steps for the brand’s new store(s).

Goal:

Empower corporate franchisees to onboard and track progress of new stores to be opened, without needing assistance or communications from Olo’s internal customer service departments.

Relevant Considerations:

• How might we give corporate brand and parent brand staff view-only access to franchisee progress for increased accountability?

• How do we begin working towards self-service bulk store onboardings?

• How do we move away from internal ownership (owned by Olo CS) to external ownership (owned by franchisees and respective brand(s)?

• How do we empower Olo CS to drive the deployment and live store management phases? (ex. Onboarding → Deployment → Live Store Management)

Pain Points

• Sensitive data such as bank account, routing numbers, etc. were input within spreadsheets and exposed in other vulnerable fashions

• In the case of missing or corrupted data, Olo CS was required to correspond with the franchisee and request the data error be manually mitigated via a new Store Status spreadsheet submission. 

• No visibility, accountability, or updates proactively provided to corporate representatives 

• No clear error surfacing or real-time data validation

Problem Validation

I inherited some prior creative iterations as a historically established starting point. There were many untested assumptions and unclear patterns utilized within the inherited designs, so a quick round of user testing to validate hypotheses were in order. Among many testing hypotheses, we were interested in diving into the following:

• Is speed paramount, or are we missing an abstract concept that takes top priority?

• Preferences around linear progression (one store after another) vs. bulk deployment (many stores at once)

• Increased corporate accountability and visibility

Historically, a pre-store-opening onboarding request would be submitted to Olo, containing a checklist of pre-opening tasks for both the franchisee and internal Olo CS to complete. These requests historically took a bit over eight weeks for the external franchisee to fulfill— due to in-depth information collection, onboarding the new franchisee to Olo systems, and deploying the store with relevant systems (internal and external), such as Olo product lines, POS systems, delivery service providers, loyalty programs, etc.

If Olo could place the end-to-end onboarding process in a franchisee’s hands, CS representatives could step back and play an as-needed supporting role, instead of their current, integrated, primary role. This empowers CS to place their focus on the pure deployment process, which is separate from the onboarding process, and focsus on back end establishments, configurations, and store or service provider logistics.

Results & Impact

• During pilot phase, 3 out of every 10 franchisees immediately adopted Self-Service Onboarding.

• Historically, store opening sheets had a turnaround time of 5 hours
  Post-release, the self-service process had a turnaround time of 20 minutes
  (Historical time was assumed to be due to widely distributed information, Excel-based vs. browser-based, user distractibility, and more)

• During the pilot quarter, franchised brands opened an average of 16% more locations than they had in previous quarters.

• Initial Adoption Goal of 70%-- we exceeded adoption goal with 74% of all eligible franchisees adopting Self-Service Franchisee Onboarding

As our team began planning for a second version, bulk self-service deployment was at the top of the priority list. The lengthy planning runway allowed time for creating and implementing bulk tooling patterns for Olo’s design system, specifically focused on creating patterns that would be flexible enough to satisfy both our team’s use case, as well as other teams’ cases.

View the v1.0 Prototype and v2.0 Prototype for Self-Service Onboarding