Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

A U.K. report is making its rounds on the Internet detailing a recent customer service debacle over a failed delivered pizza and an absent refund.

According to Metro.co.uk, Alex Hudson, a reporter for the news site, had placed an order for pizza, only to have two hours go by without the pizza showing up. As detailed in his tweets to the pizza chain, hours went by without so much as a resolution, leaving Hudson extremely frustrated and still without his order.

After much back and forth, Pizza Hut offered a gift card in the amount of £30 ($46 USD) and free pizza for Hudson’s office. Hudson had planned to donate the gift card to children in need, however, even the refund took 19 days to issue and there was no free pizza delivered to Hudson’s place of business.

Speaking on the matter after publication, Adrienne Berkes, chief marketing officer for Pizza Hut Delivery said, “It is clear that there were delays,

which are unacceptable. However we are putting in place extra processes to ensure this does not happen to anyone else now or in the future.”

The pizza chain then agreed to donate the £30 to Children In Need, although it is unclear if they have already done so.

This is an exceptional lesson in how customer service, specifically using non-traditional methods such as social media, can go wrong.

Dissatisfaction amongst customers has a significant financial outcome for businesses, and by quantifying this particular impact, businesses can make the moves to correct and establish good customer service practices that will lead to increased revenue, customer retention and customer loyalty.

Customer support is the opportunity to connect to your customers on an emotional level. As we become a more social media-centric society, it is very clear that any customer has an impactful voice they can raise at any time, pretty much anywhere they choose on the Internet. Doing bad customer service seems to become less and less of an option, and in Pizza Hut’s case, mismanaging their social interactions cost them a lot more than just a pizza; it cost a lot of bad press and one unhappy customer.

How could have the pizza chain done this differently? For one, resolving the issue in an acceptable time frame would have been a good start. A refund would have been the next logical step, and perhaps giving a pizza in kind wouldn’t have hurt, and while all those measures were in place, taking more than a few hours to correct it was the icing on the cake. It costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one, according to Bain & Company. It behooves businesses to keep the current ones happy so that it won’t turn away the new ones.