Running a delivery operation means making decisions every day: Are our drivers keeping up? Where are we seeing delivery issues? How much are third-party delivery problems costing us? And when customers have a bad experience, what actually went wrong?
The answers are often spread across different systems, making it difficult to see the bigger picture.
That’s why we’ve added a few updates to Cartwheel focused on one thing: giving operators better visibility into the parts of delivery that directly affect performance, cost, and customer experience.
Know where your delivery operation is performing
When you manage a mix of in-house drivers and third-party fleets, performance can vary significantly between them.
Delivery Insights brings that performance into one place, making it easier to compare delivery results, identify gaps, and understand where your operation has room to improve.
For example, if your in-house drivers are delivering on time 93% of the time while a third-party fleet is at 86.7%, that difference is more than just a metric. It can help you determine where to look more closely at driver capacity, dispatching, coverage, or fleet performance.
Instead of relying on gut feeling or piecing together reports from different providers, your team can use delivery data to make more informed operational decisions.
Know where your money is going
Delivery issues can quickly turn into lost revenue — and refunds are often one of the harder parts of managing third-party delivery at scale.
A refund request isn’t the end of the process. You need to know whether it was approved, rejected, or failed, and how much you actually recovered.
With automatic refund status updates for Uber Direct and DoorDash, Cartwheel gives operators visibility into the outcome of those requests without relying on manual follow-ups.
That makes it easier to track recovered revenue, identify unresolved issues, and understand the financial impact of third-party delivery — without adding more work for your operations team.
Understand what’s really affecting the customer experience
A poor delivery review doesn’t always mean the same thing.
If a customer didn’t enjoy their meal, that’s a very different problem from a meal that arrived late or was mishandled during delivery. Without that distinction, it can be difficult to know where to focus.
Cartwheel now separates food quality from delivery quality in customer reviews, giving operators a clearer view of what’s driving the experience.
That means restaurant teams can focus on food-related feedback, while delivery teams can identify issues with timeliness, drivers, or third-party performance.
Over time, this gives you a more useful picture of the customer experience — and helps ensure the right team is working on the right problem.
Turn delivery data into better decisions
Delivery performance isn’t just an operations metric. It affects costs, revenue, customer satisfaction, and ultimately whether customers order again.
The more clearly you can see what’s happening across your delivery operation, the easier it becomes to decide where to invest, where to make changes, and where you’re already performing well.
These updates are another step toward giving restaurant operators that visibility — without making them spend more time pulling data together themselves.
