(c)iStock.com/George Clerk
Pizza is big business in the united kingdom at this time. With Pizza Hut chains like Domino’s and PizzaExpress vying for a piece of the activity, it can be tough to differentiate every company’ offering.
Of course, the three have their own separate, powerful brand identities, but one specifically is busy deploying new technology to drive its customer experience ahead.
PizzaExpress has recently deployed martech solutions through IOVOX and LiveRES, automating telephone and its internet .
Throughout the integration, PizzaExpress can fully automate table management activities 24/7 and its own own reservations. The IOVOX platform enables PizzaExpress access to reserving statistics and capability to analyse over-the-phone reservation trends over time.
The technology launched substituting an present reservation system on PizzaExpress’ site – and it’s already seeing results.
As PizzaExpress’ IT director Siobhan Fagan told MarketingTech: “We’ve seen a rise in reservations already through the IVR and site, and will continue to function to optimise that further. We have an app that we have plans to enhance and relaunch in due course.”
Why the integration?
Fagan was involved in helping select the solution and they desired it to provide customers “maximum flexibility” – as well as deploying tech that would provide the restaurant chain the capacity to find out more about their customers and provide them with an enhanced experience.
It’s just our way of working, the digital group within IT and advertising are almost joined at the hip
“it is a totally integrated solution and can be gave us the chance to be sure the journey through the phone booking process is as slick and customer friendly as possible. Later on, it is going to integrate into our tills that will help us to understand our customers better and help make their experience as good as possible,” Fagan added.
PizzaExpress intends to utilize the information in the future in a myriad of ways that are personalised, including supplies to them, offering visibility of menu changes and giving them access to offers.
IT and marketing teams working together
However, what was striking about PizzaExpress – not a company by any strech of the imagination – has been its integrated marketing and IT departments.
Last month, Toshiba head of advertising for B2B PC wrote that there was a disconnect between the IT and marketing departments, and advice as to how to solve it.
But this will not stand Fagan describes.
“You should not really have the ability to acquire a piece of paper between them,” she stated, adding that with this specific project, the advertising team were “really involved”.
“It is very much a partnership between marketing and technology. About what the customer journey is to make it as simple as possible to make a booking with marketing, we worked.
“They also helped with the selection of the voice for the phone booking solution to make sure it’s on brand and fitted our tone of voice. The digital team and IT staff will work collectively as the weeks go by to further optimise the customer journey,” Fagan said.
More broadly PizzaExpress includes a dedicated team inside its IT department who work with marketing.
As Fagan clarified: “Marketing are the voice of the customer and really think through optimum customer travels, and it’s like IT’s liable to make sure we can build that in a safe, secure way in time and to budget but together with the client very foremost in our mind.
“It’s just our way of functioning, the digital team in IT and marketing are virtually joined at the hip. We have formal joint steering meetings and governance processes to make sure we are all working towards precisely the same objective.”
This marketing-IT involvement in deploying a technology solution that will hopefully improve operational and customer-service performance is 1 reason why the move might just succeed.
