Pizza Hut says so long to the void of unknown wait and hello to an innovation that allows customers to see when their pizza, wings, pasta, or dessert will be ready—before the order is even placed.
Pizza Hut is officially rolling out its new “Visible Promise Time,” which allows customers to see an estimated timeline of when their food will be ready prior to actually placing the order. Pizza Hut is the only pizza company providing customers with the ability to see their wait time before ordering. The visible promise time works both for delivery and carryout, making it easier for customers to game plan around a timeframe.
“Pizza Hut is providing hungry customers with the convenience of knowing an estimated time it could take for their order to be available before the order is actually placed,” says Baron Concors, chief digital officer, Pizza Hut. “We want to be on our customers’ timetable, not our own. That’s why we feel it’s important to be transparent with our customers upfront and in the end, it’s about making it easy for our customers to enjoy our high-quality food in the best way possible.”
As the world’s largest and most-loved pizza restaurant company, Pizza Hut has been testing the Visible Promise Time for several months, and after its successful test run, Pizza Hut is rolling out the digital feature in participating restaurants across the country. The Visible Promise Time is based on a number of factors, including the number of orders the restaurant is receiving, the number of delivery drivers available, and the average drive time for the trade area for that day.
“Customer response to this has been extremely positive,” Concors says. “Not only that, but it helps our restaurants and team members provide better service. Much like you know the wait time when you go to a dine-in restaurant, we want to bring that openness to our digital experience.”
The experience is simple. When customers visit www.pizzahut.com and click “start your order,” they will be prompted to choose either delivery or carryout and to localize using their address. If a customer chooses carryout, they will immediately see the promise time for the restaurant closest to them as well as for other restaurants nearby. If the customer chooses delivery, they will immediately see the promised delivery time as a 10-minute window for their delivery location as well as the carryout time for that restaurant. Customers can then click on “order now” to continue the ordering process and they will still receive a more specific delivery time within their 10-minute window on their confirmation page and email.
Pizza Hut, the first national pizza restaurant company to remove artificial flavors and colors from its core pizzas, has a long heritage of breakthrough innovation, in food and beyond. In 1994, a Pizza Hut pizza was the first product ever purchased via the Internet. Pizza Hut also was the first pizza restaurant company to introduce a mobile App through a partnership with Apple in 2009. Its website, www.pizzahut.com, is the busiest site in the pizza category and now nearly 50 percent of the pizza restaurant company’s orders come through digital channels, including more than 60 percent via mobile device.
To make dinner decisions easier beyond the new Visible Promise Time, the $5 Flavor Menu from Pizza Hut features a medium one-topping pizza, eight bone-out WingStreet Wings, the Ultimate Hershey’s Chocolate Chip Cookie, Hershey’s Triple Chocolate Brownie, Tuscani Pasta, a double order of breadsticks, or flavor sticks and four 20-ouncePepsi beverages for just $5 each when ordering two or more.
