BentoBox

Turning end user data into conversions for their customers

Indicative helps BentoBox quickly uncover key insights in the journey of their restaurants’ customers—so they can make better decisions and help customers weather crises.

Overview

BentoBox is a B2B2C company that empowers restaurants to own their presence, profits, and relationships by helping them build and maintain an online delivery service. 

That mission became even more difficult and vital when the COVID-19 pandemic began, shuttering restaurants and indoor dining across the U.S. and the globe.

Ecommerce—what many restaurants previously saw as a nice-to-have—became the only source of revenue for many. When that shift began, BentoBox pivoted all their internal efforts toward helping to alleviate the many challenges restaurants face with digital management and ecommerce.

The company is unique in that their own customers are businesses (B2B), but most of their work centers around serving their customers’ customers (B2B2C). To do that, they need to be able to analyze a ton of data—not just on their own website, but all across the platform and the restaurant websites built on it.

  • Gain insight into the customer journey on their customers’ websites
  • Enable deeper, more powerful analyses of the journey
  • Speed up the time from question to answer

“Indicative is a critical tool. It’s really easy to read, it’s easy to generate, and it’s powerful. This is enabling analyses that we couldn’t do otherwise.”

Ben Turndorf

Product Operations Team Lead

Challenge

Prior to finding Indicative, the team operated largely in the dark. “In terms of the front end analysis, it was Google Analytics, spreadsheets—but more or less, it was a black box,” Ben Turndorf, the company’s Product Operations Team Lead, told us.

That led to a profound lack of usable, actionable data. The team didn’t know what people were doing on their customers’ websites. They didn’t know how many visitors the websites saw, how long people spent on sites, or where people fell off in the conversion funnel. “We just had a black box, which is a terrible way to make product decisions,” Ben said.

While the team did have access to a BI solution, the technical nature of that tool, coupled with the lack of speed for analyses, was seriously limiting the product team’s ability to make data-driven product decisions.

  • They couldn’t get answers to key questions that would help them improve the product
  • The answers they could get were locked away in BI tools that were slow and technical

Ben highlighted this problem by drawing on a recent example where they quickly and easily answered a key question about a new feature—something they simply couldn’t have done before Indicative: At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the team gave restaurants an option to add a $1.99 “Covid Relief Fee” to orders. Following release of the new feature, they needed to be sure the fee wouldn’t cause consumers to balk and conversions to crater.

  • Shed light on the black box of front-end data so the product team can make better decisions
  • Make data more accessible across the product team by making analyses faster
  • Allow for real-time analyses on the impact of product changes

“We didn’t have a picture of what people were doing on the platforms we provide. We didn’t know how many visitors we had, didn’t know how long they were spending. We didn’t know where they were dropping off in the funnel.”

Solution

Once the team realized they needed a solution for front-end product analytics, they started looking into their options. What they found was a lot of tools built for B2B companies—that simply weren’t workable for their B2B2C focus. Since many solutions base their pricing strategy on monthly active users, tools like Heap, Mixpanel, and Amplitude would have blown BentoBox’s budget to smithereens.

“Indicative is uniquely aligned with our use case as a many user platform,” Ben noted. “We’re not looking at the B2B user, we’re looking at the B2B2C user, the end user. Most other platforms […] they don’t have a ton of flexibility to work with a business like ours. The price blows up.”

Once they found Indicative, they were able to put that fit to the test using the free plan. By the time they outgrew it, subscribing was a no-brainer for Ben and team.

Now, they regularly use Indicative to:

  • Test hypotheses
  • Analyze the success of new features
  • Analyze their customer journey funnel

The $1.99 Covid Relief Fee is a perfect example of how the team uses Indicative’s Multipath Funnel tool to analyze conversions and how new features impact them. Ben and team turned to the customer journey funnel to answer their core question: “Can we add this and help restaurants drive revenue at a critical time?” Or would the new feature cause customers to balk and end up costing revenue?

  • Better understand the customer journey across the platform and customers’ sites
  • Inform and test key hypotheses about conversion and the customer journey
  • Be nimble during a crisis that deeply affected BentoBox customers

Results

Adding Indicative to their data stack has made a huge difference for BentoBox. At the core of it, Ben and team are now able to ask and answer key questions they simply couldn’t answer before. Plus, they’re able to do it in 5 minutes instead of a few days.

“If it’s answerable with one of the tools in Indicative, we can get that answer real fast,” Ben explained. “And it isn’t super technical—we train people on Indicative in a half hour.”

That means the team can now take a data-driven approach to product changes, features, and updates, letting hard data lead the way instead of gut instinct or guesses. They can quickly analyze the customer journey for restaurants on their platform, identifying and fixing weak areas and drop-off points. And they can understand the impact of new feature releases in real-time.

Ben noted that the Multipath Funnel tool was the team’s favorite and most used feature, with many saying, “‘We need the funnels—the funnels are so crucial!’ Everyone was like, ‘They’re crazy useful, it’s a critical tool. It’s really easy to read, it’s easy to generate, and it’s powerful.’”

As for the Covid Relief Fee example Ben highlighted, the team was able to analyze conversion funnels and ensure the feature would be ultimately beneficial for restaurants—and it was. The fee didn’t impact conversion rates at all, but it generated nearly $550,000 for BentoBox customers since its release.

  • Easily ask and answer questions they couldn’t before
  • Access data in a matter of 5 minutes
  • Roll out new features to help restaurants weather the COVID-19 pandemic

“With Indicative, I can answer questions in 5 minutes. We can get that answer real fast. And it isn’t super technical—we train people on Indicative in a half hour.”