How Olo uses Twilio Compliance Toolkit to serve leading restaurant brands

Challenge

Olo needs to provide its restaurant brand customers with the tools to send secure, reliable, and compliant SMS communications. They also look to use vendors that can provide an easy and seamless experience to integrate with Olo’s products.

Solution

Olo implemented Twilio’s Compliance Toolkit to support its restaurant brand customers in their efforts to send millions of compliant messages to restaurant patrons.

In today’s digital-first restaurant world, guest engagement goes far beyond the table. While personalized messaging drives loyalty and orders, it must also be secure, private, and compliant. With trust and reputation at stake, compliance isn’t just a backend concern, it’s a vital part of the customer experience.

Olo is a leading restaurant technology provider with ordering, payment, and guest engagement solutions that help brands increase orders, streamline operations, and improve the guest experience. Each day, Olo processes millions of orders on its open SaaS platform, gathering the right data from each touchpoint into a single source—so restaurants can better understand and better serve every guest on every channel, every time.

Engage, one of Olo’s core product offerings, is a powerful MarTech solution that helps restaurants deliver personalized guest communications at scale. In light of evolving compliance requirements, Olo was drawn to Twilio’s Compliance Toolkit as an easy-to-implement supplement to the existing Olo Engage experience.

Cracking the code on SMS compliance 

For Olo’s restaurant brands, guest journeys are powered by communications. Everything from reservation updates to personalized offers to surveys and more. Each message depends on timing, relevance, and trust. 

But SMS compliance can be complex. Ray Gallagher, VP and GM of Olo Engage, explains, “The rules can differ by state, people change numbers, opt-ins and opt-outs are sporadic, and every detail matters when you’re sending tens-of-millions of messages annually.” 

And there can be substantial financial risks. Fines from the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) can reach up to $1,500 per violation, and class action lawsuit settlements can reach millions of dollars. 

Because of this, Olo made it a priority to help its customers with SMS compliance by incorporating Twilio’s Compliance Toolkit, which helps restaurants avoid compliance missteps by sending a promotional offer during federal “quiet hours,” messaging a reassigned number, or texting someone who’s opted out. Ray states, “Keeping up with all the compliance laws is complicated for our customers and while it’s ultimately their responsibility, we believe it is in everybody’s best interest if we provide them with platform-level tools that create an easy button experience.”

Letting AI do the heavy compliance lifting 

Olo was already leveraging Twilio’s suite of APIs for SMS, MMS, and email to drive personalized communications at scale. But as compliance requirements grew, Olo was looking for a future-proof solution that could support restaurant brand compliance needs without compromising on customer experience or introducing systems complexity.

Twilio’s launch of Compliance Toolkit arrived at the perfect time. 

Compliance Toolkit uses artificial intelligence to detect and prevent potential compliance violations by blocking or rescheduling messages sent during quiet hours, to opted-out contacts, or reassigned numbers. Brands can still override or adjust settings to fit their needs.

“We like to provide an ‘easy-button’ approach for our brands, so they don’t have to do anything to instantly get these benefits,” Gallagher says.

Immediate, transformative results that reduce compliance overhead

Olo saw substantial results in the first six weeks after implementing Compliance Toolkit. More than 6 million messages were reviewed by Compliance Toolkit in real time without any extended latency to their setup. 

Notably, the system operated with 100% accuracy in its analysis of essential vs non-essential messages. It also had zero false positives, or misappropriately flagging messages as non-compliant, ensuring that legitimate communications were delivered and customer engagement remained seamless.

Stronger together: powering solutions that stick 

Compliance Toolkit reflects the strong partnership between Olo and Twilio. More than a tech provider, Twilio helps power trusted, innovative guest engagement at scale. With Compliance Toolkit, Olo quickly strengthened its platform, providing brands with a scalable tool against compliance risk, while enabling seamless, personalized messaging.

Olo is now free to focus on what matters, driving more value for restaurants and their guests. Of particular note is the excitement around Rich Communications Services (RCS) and the capability to provide a branded experience. “We’re excited about deepening real-time personalization, leveraging AI for new use cases, and helping brands turn every interaction into loyalty,” Gallagher says.