ChowNow in Playa Vista provides branded online ordering systems for independent restaurants across the US — via restaurants’ own websites, on Facebook and Google pages.
$119
Per Annual
Olo
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Olo in New York provides an on-demand interface for the restaurant industry, designed to drive digital ordering and delivery for restaurant brands.
The ChowNow platform is rock solid with daily use. It is easy to set up and train new staff. Lower pricing with competitors is the only reason for the 8 of 10
After using a previous integrator, I can safely say I would recommend Olo above the competition. Olo successfully consolidates all platforms for order ingestion thus simplifying the entire process of digital ordering. Trying to do it any other way would simply be foolish. The technology works and there is a great support structure behind the scenes to make sure that if there are any questions, feature requests, or advancements that they get added to the development queue.
Olo makes the guest experience easy and understandable while placing their orders. They can easily customize their order, modifying each item to their liking using the guidelines we at our restaurant have given.
If there are issues with our equipment, Olo is quick to respond and get us back online.
Better structure of Pizza menus to ease 86 toppings
The new interface could use some work. Smaller fonts make the "tickets" difficult to determine correct information. The system defaults to the last ticket time - The standard system was actually more accurate
Olo's usability is great. The only area that keeps them from being a 10 is menu management. Menu management is absolutely workable, but it could be better. The rest of the system works well and is very usable and user-friendly. To the extent that their menu management has opportunities, the Olo Expo product helps this out with the people that need it the most, and thus why they score a 9 overall. Without Olo Expo, I'd score it an 8.
No product is ever perfect and support is there to help when that is the case. The vast majority of time the Olo support team is quick, transparent, and resolves the issues. However, I can't say that they are absolutely perfect (but few support teams are). The only thing keeping them from a 10 is the LVL1 support teams will often not read a ticket fully and see that the troubleshooting steps they are about to give have already taken place.
I push customers toward ChowNow instead of the references apps because of a) ChowNow has lower commission costs b) ChowNow gives customer data access c) ChowNow allows me to better issue refunds or adjustments. ChowNow however does not provide as much visibility to "new" potential customers. This is just my guess -- there are less average users on the ChowNow app on a nightly basis vs. the UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhubs of the world.
Revel is my POS provider and they want to charge way to much for online integration so I have not tried it. What I have tried is each companies own apps on their tablets. I would rather have 3 or 4 different tablets that are good at what they do for their respective company then use your "all-in-one" solution that honestly is much worse.
Time savings for employees has been a positive impact.
Our takeout business has increased from less than 10% to over 30% in the last 2 years, we could not have been as successful with this increase without the help of Olo.
