Quandoo boosts sales and keeps customers happy with Tableau

Quandoo is the world's fastest-growing online platform for restaurant reservations, employing more than 500 people. Quandoo was founded in 2012 in Berlin, and today has a community of more than 240 million guests and 18,000 partner restaurants in 12 countries. Since 2015, Quandoo has been a subsidiary of the Japanese Recruit Group.

Online reservations is a fast-growing and hugely competitive market. Here, Florian Bachmann, Head of BI at Quandoo, reports how the company is developing into a data-driven organization with Tableau to stay one step ahead. Tableau is enabling Quandoo’s employees to explore their data and find previously hidden insights, freeing up the BI department to deliver strategic projects for the business.

“As a multinational online service company, Quandoo relies on up-to-date data,” explains Florian Bachmann, Head of BI at Quandoo. “We realized around five years ago that our BI solution, built on open source software, was not going to support us in the future.” The central BI team was inundated with everyday business questions, and bottlenecks were wasting employees’ valuable time and effort that could be better spent elsewhere.

Tableau changed everything. “Simply put, it is the best solution for us,” according to Florian. “Tableau allows us the flexibility we need when it comes to visual analytics, and connects easily to our various data sources. Tableau incorporates sophisticated access and security management, meaning we can maintain certain controls while allowing employees to explore themselves.”

The BI department offers centralized support. By developing employee training sessions, conducting weekly Q&A sessions, and supporting power users in various departments around the business, adoption has accelerated. “Tableau has expanded to virtually all areas of the business,” explains Florian. “For the BI team today, a project is only concluded when it can be interrogated and analysed in Tableau.”

With Tableau a mainstay across Quandoo, the company has achieved real transformation globally. “Our employees can answer the vast majority of their business questions themselves with the help of Tableau. It saves employees a lot of time and effort, and frees capacity in the central departments for strategic projects. Thanks to Tableau, Quandoo has turned into a really data-driven enterprise.”

Tableau helps improve Quandoo-owned apps and online platforms. “Our contact with restaurants and guests nearly exclusively takes place via our apps, both iOS and Android, as well as online ads and web portals,” explains Florian. “Small changes to our apps, for example regarding text or image size and color, or with menus and navigation structure, can result in considerable differences in response and conversion rates of our activities. We’re now using Tableau to analyze the results of countless A/B tests, helping us to identify and deploy the most effective solutions to keep our customers happy. In addition, evaluating our online advertising spend enables us to improve our return on investment, diverting money to the most effective campaigns.

“With Tableau in virtually every area of the company, our employees are autonomous and can find new insights to improve our business.”

Identifying and attracting eligible restaurant partners is central to Quandoo’s success. While the Quandoo sales teams are available in many countries and cities, physical customer meetings are costly. Quandoo uses Tableau’s advanced mapping capabilities to quickly identify the most promising candidates, determining which cities and restaurants to target.

Tableau allows more in depth, interactive analysis, incorporating seating capacity, geographical location, menu, and customer reviews. “With our geographic analysis in Tableau, we make our sales teams more successful,” explains Florian. “Tableau increases the probability our sales team closes a deal, and increases the commitment of new restaurant partners when it comes to volume of orders. This improves our position for the future massively. We have developed into the world’s fastest-growing restaurant reservation platform by becoming truly data-driven.”

Quandoo is planning further expansion of Tableau across the business to keep data-driven innovation top of mind. Embedding Tableau within Quandoo’s own platform is the next step, allowing restaurants to see and understand their data regarding orders, guests and more. Florian explains “Overall, by using Tableau we consider ourselves really well-positioned to tackle current and future challenges in a highly competitive online reservation market. We expect to successfully grow and expand our position as a global leader further.”