Pizza Hut's Baron Concors
Who would have thought ten years ago that you’d be able to order a pizza over the phone…without talking to anybody.
That was the goal of Pizza Hut executives – which have “a history of taking calculated risks” – said company Chief Information and Digital Officer Baron Concors at a session at the National Retail Federation’s NRFtech: The IT Leadership Summit.
At a meeting of the senior team in early 2009, Concors said someone pointed out that every executive – ranging in age from 40-65 – had an iPhone. With the insight that smartphone adoption would begin to soar, the company decided they needed to be ahead of the curve in mobile retailing to remain competitive in the cutthroat pizza space. Originally, the company thought their app would target young people (specifically, young males who didn’t want to cook) but quickly realized the iPhone was being adopted quickly among consumers in older age groups.
Before moving forward, Concors said executives asked many of the same questions as they did before they launched their website in 2007. They discussed potential ROI, cannibalization from other channels, whether the app would bring in new customers or at least be relevant to existing customers. Ultimately, he said, all agreed that the risk of doing nothing was greater than moving forward, and they began to create an app that was “intuitive, fun and leveraged features of the device” like GPS and finger swipes.
The development process wasn’t all rosy. Because some customers may have been hesitant to download an app that was too large, the company scaled back some pie-in-the-sky functionalities. Additionally, because speed to market was imperative, it wasn’t completely feasible to do everything they may have liked for the initial launch.
It was impossible to know how long it would take Apple to approve the app, and it had to be perfect on the first try, Concors said. “If they find issues, you’re going back to scratch,” he said. (He also advised that companies register as an iTunes developer early.)
Once the company was ready to launch, they promoted the app far and wide. For a short period, app users received 20% off their order. And the company also featured the app on its homepage, Facebook page, YouTube videos and its television ads, which quickly moved it up to the top lifestyle spot in the iTunes store. (It also didn’t hurt that Apple featured the Pizza Hut app in one of its commercials that ran for a three-month period – providing Pizza Hut with an estimated $25 million in free PR.) While the buzz was mostly positive, Concors said it was important to seek out and address the negative comments from the beginning to make updates and changes quickly that improved the customer experience.
While the app still produces challenges – for example, the company substantially underestimated the number of people who would walk into a Pizza Hut hoping for troubleshooting with a problem iPhone – the benefits have far outweighed the costs. Concors didn’t divulge current sales of the app, but the company acknowledged in late 2009 that customers purchased over $1 million in pizza, wings and breadsticks through the app within three months after it was introduced.
Today, over five million people have downloaded the iPhone app, and it doesn’t stop there. Recently, the company launched an iPad app in high-definition so stunning you might decide to splurge on that extra order of cheesesticks. And some Hershey’s Chocolate Dunkers. (The research for this blog post is making me hungry.) They also recently launched an app for the Android and are developing a mobile ordering app for the Windows Mobile 7 Smartphone.
At the end of the day, what it all boils down to is this: If you’re in the mood for pizza, you can order it almost any way you want it…from almost any device you want. And for pizza lovers everywhere, that is a beautiful thing.