Pizza Hut® Announces New Social Ordering Platform

PLANO, Texas, July 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Pizza Hut, recognized as the pizza restaurant which serves and delivers more pizzas than any other pizza restaurant in the world, along with leading SaaS platform tech company Conversable, are announcing today the launch of a new Pizza Hut social ordering platform, or "chatbot," to allow for conversational ordering of favorite pizzas and other menu items on Facebook Messenger and Twitter. The platform, which will be available across Pizza Hut social media accounts this fall, is debuting at the 2016 Venturebeat MobileBeat Conference in San Francisco with a demo from Baron Concors, Chief Digital Officer, Pizza Hut.

"The new Pizza Hut social ordering platform is another example of making it easy for our customer to order their favorites from Pizza Hut," said Concors. "We are constantly pursuing ways to simplify our ordering experience. This platform allows our consumers to quickly order or get information where they are already spending a great deal of their time."

With this service, customers will be able to reorder their favorites or saved orders from any U.S. Pizza Hut location by chatting directly with the Pizza Hut accounts on Facebook Messenger and Twitter, as well as get answers to frequently asked questions and receive the latest deals and promotions.

The idea for integrating social ordering into the Pizza Hut brand experience came from a desire to engage with the brand's strong following on social media and to further extend its focus on personalized customer service. The company sees conversational ordering as an opportunity to interact with this audience on the social platforms of which they are already heavy users to provide a quick, easy ordering experience.

"We are committed to servicing our customers in the most convenient way and meeting them in the channels they already prefer," said Concors. "This launch reinforces our goal of being the most customer-centered pizza company with an emphasis the simplification and personalization of our digital experience."

For initial launch, customers will be able to connect their Facebook messaging account to their Pizza Hut account to dramatically reduce the information required to order. The menus, deals and promotions offered are specific to each restaurant and there is no extra cost to the user to order through Facebook Messenger or Twitter at participating locations. Once an order is confirmed, Pizza Hut will email the customer a receipt and an order confirmation message will be sent in the messenger conversation. From there, picking up the order is no different from the traditional online ordering system or calling into the local restaurant.

Conversable's enterprise platform allows for the creation of interactive, automated experiences on messaging and voice platforms. Conversable specializes in "conversational commerce," which enables transactions through conversations on messaging and voice interfaces allowing customers to say what they want on Facebook Messenger and Twitter DM. The Conversable powered-platform allows for Pizza Hut to resolve common requests and self-service through automation and machine learning resulting in reduced costs and better service.

"We could not be more excited to demo and launch this new Pizza Hut social ordering experience," said Ben Lamm, CEO and Co-Founder, Conversable. "Giving instant, conversational access to Pizza Hut lovers in all social channels is pretty amazing and powerful. By enabling those customers to find deals and reorder their favorites all without leaving their messaging channels versus stopping what they are doing and going to download an app is incredibly seamless."

As the first national pizza restaurant to remove artificial flavors and colors from its core pizzas, Pizza Hut is known around the world for its long heritage of breakthrough innovation in food and beyond, including the Original Pan™ Pizza, Original Stuffed Crust®, Cheesy Bites, and more. The pizza restaurant company also has the world's busiest website in the pizza category at www.pizzahut.com. Nearly 50 percent of the pizza restaurant company's orders come through digital channels, including more than 60 percent of those orders via a mobile device.

For more information, visit blog.pizzahut.com or to order now, visit www.pizzahut.com.

About Pizza Hut
Pizza Hut, a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE: YUM), delivers more pizza, pasta and wings than any other restaurant in the world. The company began 58 years ago in Wichita, Kansas, when two brothers borrowed $600 from their mom to start a pizzeria. What started out small has become the biggest pizza company in the world and today operates more than 16,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries serving innovative pizzas, traditional favorites like the signature Pan Pizza, and much more. Pizza Hut also is the proprietor of the BOOK IT!® Program, which is a long-standing children's literacy program used in more than 630,000 classrooms nationwide. For more information, visit www.pizzahut.com. Follow Pizza Hut on Facebook (www.facebook.com/PizzaHut), Twitter (www.twitter.com/pizzahut) and Instagram (www.instagram.com/pizzahut).

About Conversable:
Conversable is the leading SaaS platform for creating intelligent, automated conversational messaging experiences for customer self-service, conversational commerce, and on-demand content via major messaging and voice applications. Learn more about Conversable at http://conversable.com.

*For all media inquiries, please contact Pizza Hut:
Doug Terfehr, 972-338-6992, [email protected]
Courtney Moscovic, 972-338-8288, [email protected]

SOURCE Pizza Hut

Related Links

http://www.pizzahut.com