Pizza Hut gives delivery tracking a whirl
Pizza Hut Nav (that’s ‘navigation’) being tested at 75 sites in Dallas area
The delivery driver is suddenly becoming more closely watched than Kim Kardashian.
Fast-food delivery drivers will become even more closely watched next month when Pizza Hut rolls out a delivery test at 75 locations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area dubbed Pizza Hut Nav (short for navigation), where most consumers will be able to track their delivery drivers — and their pizzas — on a map from the time of order until the driver shows up on their street.
For Pizza Hut, it’s about trying to catch up with — and possibly inch past — archrival Domino’s, which has been widely viewed as ahead of the curve on delivery. For the fast-food industry, with consumers — particularly Millennials — demanding convenience, transparency and instant information, a new era of delivery appears to be on tap.
But the burgeoning industry of using mobile apps or other devices to monitor the delivery process is much bigger than fast food — and, experts say, could ultimately become second nature to just about any product that gets ordered and delivered, from Amazon items to Zappos shoes.
“Millennials and Gen Z are so completely comfortable with the instant info-sharing of text, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat that it is inconceivable to them that delivery info is not built in to any system they use,” says Christopher Muller, professor of hospitality at Boston University.
Executives at Pizza Hut concede Uber is changing everything.
“They’ve not just disrupted the transportation industry — they’ve disrupted commerce,” says Baron Concors, global chief digital officer at Pizza Hut. “This is what consumers want: 100% transparency about where their order is.”
The announcement by Pizza Hut comes just one day after McDonald’s announced that it, too, is about to launch a delivery test at 88 McDonald’s restaurants in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. The delivery test is with Postmates, the same thirdparty delivery service that Starbucks recently said it also will use in a Seattle delivery test later this year.
The move also follows a similar announcement earlier this week by Domino’s that it was launching something called GPS Driver Tracker in Australia — designed to encourage safer delivery driving and to give consumers a window on delivery “from the store to your door,” as the company’s commercial says.
For Pizza Hut, transparent delivery on a national basis should come sooner than later. It’s already tested the Uber-like delivery in parts of Russia and Israel. After the three-month test in Dallas, executives hope to quickly go national with it, but they aren’t saying just when.