Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Pizza -- with a slice of Technology

Attie Vandermerwe, EVP - Customer Success Consulting Services

Our team just completed a really compelling customer success story about Domino’s Pizza – the world’s second biggest pizza chain and a pioneer in home delivery. A few years ago, in the face of aggressive competition, the company’s market share took a dip.

That’s when Dominos regrouped -- and reinvented its business model. It kicked off a massive strategic investment in technology to infuse each part of its operations with tech-enabled capabilities. The goal: to make Domino’s the “easiest company to order a pizza from.”

The investment paid off. Customers now do most of their pizza ordering online – and then track their orders from oven to doorstep. Point-of-sales analytics is helping Domino’s learn more about customer preferences. And a solid network backbone means that the website never goes down, especially on Super Bowl Sunday. Which is coming up soon!!!

Dominos realized that technology and data are just as critical -- and as core to the business -- as its store franchise operations and secret pizza recipes. So thorough has been Domino’s digital transformation that it has sometimes been called a “technology company that just happens to sell pizza.”

But justifying such a significant technology investment, and massively realigning a company’s business priorities in the process, is easier said than done. It’s an art as much as it’s a science. It requires companies to:

·        Identify the real value that the technology solutions will deliver
·        Quantify the impact of this business value on
o   The IT organization
o   The business
o   The end customers /consumers – the most important stakeholder of all
·        Communicate this technology impact, so the results speak for themselves

Furthermore, companies need to continue to find new ways to capture value from their initial investment.  For example, Domino’s is leveraging data to better segment its customer base and understand buying behavior -- not only to improve how it makes and delivers pizza, but how to design better pizza stores and make every customer engagement an interactive experience.


The question is: how are you telling your technology impact story? I’d love to hear from you. attie@mainstaycompany.com