Dojo, the leading payments technology provider, has launched Dojo Intelligence, an intelligence platform that turns card payments data into actionable commercial insight, helping hospitality and retail operators better understand customer behaviour, expand reach and drive growth.

The launch comes as hospitality operators face growing pressure to make business decisions with limited customer insight. While e-commerce businesses have long had access to detailed customer analytics and attribution tools, many restaurants, pubs and bars still rely on fragmented datasets or loyalty schemes to understand how customers behave and what drives revenue. At the same time, customer-centric businesses are outperforming operationally-centric focused competitors by three times according to Dojo data, increasing pressure on operators to better understand and engage their customers.

Dojo Intelligence is designed to close that gap by turning transaction data from Dojo’s payments network into commercial insight. Drawing on anonymised spending insights from more than 49 million monthly customers across thousands of hospitality businesses, the platform helps businesses understand their customer pool, where they come from and how often they return, giving them a clearer view of what drives performance. 

Through the platform, businesses can track customer volumes, understand new and repeat customer visits, analyse catchment areas and benchmark performance against local competitors and wider UK market trends. Weekly reporting and real-time insights also help operators identify changes in customer behaviour early and assess the impact of marketing campaigns with greater accuracy.

Unlike traditional analytics tools, which often rely on partial datasets from bookings, loyalty schemes or CRM systems, Dojo Intelligence captures all card transactions processed through Dojo terminals. The platform can be deployed in less than a day, and includes dashboards, automated summaries and support from Dojo’s Insight Analysts and Data Scientists, without requiring dedicated in-house data teams.

Jon Knott, General Manager of Data Products, Dojo, said: “Hospitality businesses have historically had very limited visibility of customer behaviour while online retailers can measure almost every interaction a customer has with their brand.

We built Dojo Intelligence to level the playing field by giving merchants access to the kind of insight that has traditionally only been available in e-commerce - helping them understand what’s driving performance and where opportunities for growth exist.”

Early pilot results have already shown measurable impact. One pizza restaurant used Dojo Intelligence to plan where to focus its digital advertising campaign and then measure its impact. The campaign brought in 347 additional customers, generating more than £12,000 in incremental sales. Other operators are using the platform to benchmark performance across multiple sites, identify high-value customer groups and improve the effectiveness of local marketing activity.