Restaurant and delivery chain refines performance of major route to market

Restaurant and delivery chain refines performance of major route to market

Over 38% of Pizza Hut’s home delivery business comes through its website, which demands an exacting web-testing programme for faultless customer service.

Updated every eight weeks, the website is designed to provide exactly the online experience its customers expect – food delivered to the door, hot, fresh and on time.

John Zray, Pizza Hut UK online delivery manager, stated: “Online pizza ordering is an essential part of our business, with no scope for website error. We can take web orders from across the UK and don’t have the luxury of 24-hour or longer delivery times – we have 30 minutes. Our online customers contact us when they want a pizza and they want it fresh, hot and on time.”

Keeping website up to date

To offer a regularly updated menu, Pizza Hut makes frequent changes to the product. Changes to the web site include ‘limited time offer’ feature pizzas, and marketing initiatives such as last year’s ‘A-Team’ pizzas, promoted to tie in with the recent release of the A-Team movie.

Zray explained: “Our ordering process is too specific to our business to fit into an off-the-shelf software package, so our website is a bespoke development. We re-write a portion of the web site every few weeks, but everything has to work as the customer expects and we have to fulfil our 30-minute window.”

Two weeks before each change IT consultancy PMC carries out user acceptance testing (UAT) on the website to test new options. This includes reviewing all the different Pizza combinations – selecting types, bases, toppings and sizes to make sure they all work as the users expect. They also test the ‘Everyday Value Deals,’ where customers can choose different combinations of products at discounted prices.”

Ensuring browser compatibility

To ensure the Pizza Hut website is easy to understand, user friendly and intuitive, PMC’s testing programme covers Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. Martin Kitwood, IT director at Pizza Hut, said: “PMC’s comprehensive and reliable testing routine ensures our site’s integrity.”

Zray continues: “PMC recognise the business-critical aspect of testing and provides continuity across our testing programme. Their web testing experience means short briefing times and speedy implementation, plus we are confident the testing is bulletproof.”

For the future, Pizza Hut is considering other online ordering channels. It already has one mobile ordering application, and is looking to expand much further on that. It is also looking at options to extend its use of social networking channels.

Zray concluded: “Going forward, we are looking at how to improve the customer ordering ‘journey’ based on what we’ve learned over the years, and we also want to ensure that our customers find it as easy to order our products from a smartphone as they do from their PC, laptop or tablet.”