Wolt: Delivering democratized data and insights through Honeycomb
Story Highlights
When it comes to delivery platforms, choice is king. If you can find your favorite restaurant on one platform but not the other, it’s clear which one you’ll use to order your meal. Or maybe you’re in a new country and need to find a store that sells a cheap travel adapter so you can charge your phone battery that’s about to run out. Options open doors.
About Wolt
Wolt develops a local commerce platform that connects people looking to order food, groceries, and other goods with people interested in selling and delivering them.
Wolt was founded in Helsinki, Finland in 2014 and joined forces with DoorDash in 2022. Together, they operate in more than 30 countries today, 28 of which are with the Wolt product and brand.
This is what drives local commerce platform Wolt to collaborate with Honeycomb and visualize its offering of restaurants and retailers across more than 1,000 cities in 30+ countries worldwide on detailed, real-time maps. Using Honeycomb has not only helped Wolt identify areas of expansion for their sales team to target, but also democratize business insights across the company.
Accessing real-time data
Every single part of Wolt’s value chain has a geospatial component to it. They take an order from a customer who lives at point A to a merchant based at point B and the order is fulfilled by a third-party courier that is located elsewhere in the neighborhood. Location data is central to each part of the journey.
One of the most important drivers of growth for local commerce platforms is selection: the quantity and the quality of the venues on the platform. Being strategic about getting new merchants on board, and ensuring they’re available to users when they open up the app is crucial. It was clear that being able to visualize selection and being able to move beyond a purely numbers-based approach would add tremendous value.
However, external map tools offered by other vendors and in-house solutions not only proved to be time intensive but also difficult to reproduce and unsuitable for anything beyond ad-hoc, one-off analyses. This was mainly caused by the fact that these solutions were not integrated within Wolt’s backend systems, meaning the data was static.
“The other solutions we used required us to download CSVs from our data environment and then upload them into their tools that read latitude, longitudes, or H3 IDs and display them on a map. This means the data is static, which becomes messy, and it takes a long time. You write a query, you download it, you upload it, you get feedback on it, you iterate, you change that query, delete your map, download, upload, and so forth. These cycles are not the best use of technical resources and time", said Sharat Ramamani, the Head of Selection Analytics at Wolt.
The abundance of available location data and absence of a solution on the market that automatically visualizes data onto maps with the most up-to-date data possible and creates new business applications is what drove initial conversations between Honeycomb and Wolt. Following the successful launch of Honeycomb’s native app integration with Wolt’s Snowflake environment, the collaboration swiftly formalized and Wolt has been using Honeycomb for real-time analysis ever since.
“We want the app to show the latest, most up-to-date data possible, without our teams having to do anything. When they log on, we want to make sure that it's like logging into any other application that exists at Wolt. Having a solution directly integrated into our own data sources makes the data a lot more dynamic and allows us to share this with anyone at the company," says Ramamani.
Unlocking new capabilities
The result is that the Selection Analytics team, which introduced the Honeycomb solution at Wolt, is no longer required to act as a support arm: involving the support of a data scientist for each analysis request or whenever internal users have a follow-up question. The Honeycomb solution has transformed geospatial analysis into an intuitive self-service solution, allowing the Selection Analytics team to focus their attention and resources on sales enablement instead: providing Wolt’s sales force with insights to inform local expansion efforts and strategically target new merchants. “Honeycomb provides us with a scalable tool that allows end users to answer their own questions, which is our goal”, explains Ramamani.
The first use case Wolt developed was a universal map incorporating the most important layers relevant to the business and proved an instant success. On the map, you can see and filter Wolt venues (whether restaurants or retailers), view specific merchant subcategories (e.g. grocery stores and pharmacies), and determine the share of potential local merchants that Wolt has on its platform. The venues are included as points, the operational areas in the form of polygons, and for comparison between areas hexagons are used as well. Certain hexagons are shaded lighter or darker based on the number of Wolt venues in that area.
Besides selection, purchase and operational data could also be found on the map, which was relevant to the merchant, customer, and operations teams. Each team can view and use the same map in a different way to answer their specific questions. The solution has been very well received and teams consider the insights really valuable. This has led to a flurry of requests as people want to start using Honeycomb to answer more specific, niche or complex questions.
Ramamani explains that, “While using Honeycomb has definitely allowed us to save a lot of time, I see it even more as a capability unlock.”
Reaching all levels through accessible UI
Honeycomb has quickly become part of people’s daily workflows at Wolt. This is mainly down to the ease of use and the accessibility of the user interface. Other external tools Wolt used were generally highly modular and of a technical nature, making them less suited to the business customers. Typically these tools would also only be used by managers and below, who in turn distill the insights for leaders. However, Honeycomb’s maps have proven to be very palatable and easily interpretable, meaning they could be viewed across all levels of the organization, including executives such as the CEO.
According to Ramamani, “The universal map was great for launching Honeycomb internally, because it allowed us to get top down buy-in and support from the start. It was immediately adopted by executives and business-unit leaders, as it included key metrics they oversee across the business.”
Everyone is a visual learner in some capacity. While the business of logistics and deliveries can become quite complex, visualizing and simplifying quantitative elements on a geospatial map has proven very useful, because it makes insights more accessible across the organization. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to look at a map and understand what's going on. A big part of this is ensuring a good user experience, ensuring the app doesn’t spend lots of time loading and buffering.
According to Ramamani, “People really, really like the solution. Honeycomb is now one of the key pillars that allows our teams to understand the business better, understand their function better, and drive growth. Its greatest value is the democratization of insights: anyone can look at a map and understand what’s going on and Honeycomb makes that really easy to do."
With Honeycomb, Wolt delivers detailed, real-time data across the organization, helping the entire company to make more informed, data-driven decisions.