18 stories

18 March 2019

Last week, we rolled out one small but very important feature on our website in Russia. Now you can see average delivery time and average customer ratings retrieved from our mobile app for every city. Why is that so important?

We’re giving real statistics from Dodo IS, our internal IT system. The naked truth. Openness is our company philosophy. We are merciless with ourselves. We burn bridges, so to speak, denying ourselves a chance to work poorly. If our pizza delivery takes too much time somewhere, you will see it at once. Perhaps, it will deter you from ordering; so we will have no choice but to work better. We focus on the point, and the point is our customers.

Interestingly, one of our main competitors also publishes the “average delivery time” of the previous week on its website in Russia. And their figures—which are very low indeed—remain constant for weeks, no matter what city we’re talking about. With our approach, we will seem to be slower than our competitor, yes, but we believe that in business you can’t achieve long-term success through manipulation. Such is our approach. In truth we trust.

For example, when I checked our pizzerias in different cities, I was ashamed for Dodo Pizza in Yaroslavl. They deliver in 59 minutes on average (!), and their rating is rather low, as far as we’re concerned. And I’m proud for 50 pizzerias in Moscow with the average delivery time of 37 minutes, which is good for such a complex megalopolis, though we definitely could do much better.

I’m certain that now that we’ve opened our ratings, our performance will improve, because openness doesn’t leave us a chance to work poorly. And that’s just the beginning. We are going to develop these tools further. Soon, there will be ratings for every pizzeria (for instance, some Moscow franchisees work well, and others, not so well). You will be able to see rating lists and pick the best pizzerias in a particular city or country.

Further reading: Rate your pizza: Dodo testing its killer feature

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06 March 2019

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.

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How we boosted our TV ad performance using real-time mobile data

02 February 2019

How we boosted our TV ad performance using real-time mobile data

For many people, traditional marketing—like advertising on TV, for example—still looks pretty straightforward.

If you have deep pockets, all you need to do is hire a fancy agency, shoot a nice commercial, buy some time slots on a few TV channels—and just enjoy the ride.

It’s not that simple anymore. We at Dodo Pizza learned that there is an untapped potential in mixing traditional marketing with digital channels that can significantly improve the performance of your ads. And we aren’t talking about integrated marketing campaigns here—we’re talking about adjusting your TV strategy and even buying using real-time digital data.

Our most significant...

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Next Year is the Key

31 December 2018

Next Year is the Key

A New Year’s Day is a relative point, but it measures time. It’s good to take stock of what’s done and set new goals for the future. Today I’ve asked myself a simple question—what was the key moment for our company in 2018? Not an easy question. There are many answers, but what was the most important thing in terms of the long-range prospects of our business?

In 2018, our company has become profitable. We’ve been trying to achieve this for seven years. Dodo Pizza is a franchising company, so the parent...

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Half-and-half pizza

30 November 2018

Half-and-half pizza

Our international competitors have long been baking half-and-half pizza, combining two recipes in one product. But in my humble opinion, how they do it is pretty awful. Their interfaces are cumbersome and too complicated, so kitchens make a lot of mistakes.

This year, we set a daring goal for ourselves—we are going to reinvent half-and-half pizza. And if we take up a job, we want to do it in the best possible way.

In December, we’re going to launch a system for ordering half-and-half pizza in all our pizzerias in Russia. We’ve been testing it...

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