How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

A customer in Moscow ordered our pizza and specified that he wanted to pay on delivery with a credit card. Our courier delivered the pizza but forgot to bring a POS terminal with him. What did he do? He couldn’t accept payment, so he left and took a hot pizza with him, leaving a hungry and disappointed customer without it.

Is it the courier’s fault? He was polite and acted according to what his common sense told him; no payment, no pizza. I think, in those countries where the competition is really fierce, it’s hard to imagine such an incident, because common sense tells everybody, from a courier to a pizza maker, that losing a customer is much worse than losing a pizza.

So whose mistake was that? Ours. We haven’t instilled our principles into the courier. He didn’t know what to do in this situation (give the pizza to the customer, and then come back with a POS terminal). We have strict standards in our kitchens, but in our customer relationships, only principles, because relationships cannot be standardized. We trust our customers. They are always our first priority, and for us, in any dispute, a customer is always right, even if it’s a customer who’s made a mistake. We work for our customers.

So, what did we learn from this incident? That the principles of our company should be impressed on all our employees more clearly. It’s not that simple, because we already have more than 15,000 employees in our chain. And now I realize that we haven’t done it so well. We have our Dodo Book, that’s true, but currently we don’t have a clear and simple list of principles we should repeat over and over again, mantra-like, so it would be impossible not to know them. And we’re going to rectify that.