1. Pizza Hut: Leveraging Technology To Engineer Customer
Happiness Proactively
Customers always get an experience along with a product or service. That experience may be
good or bad, lasting or fleeting, a random phenomenon or an engineered perception.
Companies reengineering their businesses should think about incorporating “humanics” into
their business design.
Humanics are context clues that emanate from people. They are engineered by defining and
choreographing the desired behavior of employees involved in the customer encounter.
Humanics determine the interpersonal relationships in a buying experience—how employees
make customers feel.
Today I want to discuss a universal topic of interest that every one of us has experienced. Pizza.
More specifically, which pizza heavy-weight scores higher points on creating and delivering
customer “wow”.
It has been a ritual to give the ladies of the house a break from cooking on Fridays. On Fridays,
we eat out or order in. If we order in, it’s almost always pizza for dinner. So Friday nights are
now lovingly called “pizza nights”.
© Rupa Shankar
www.cxpdesign.com

2. We have been ordering from a Pizza Hut just around the corner for the last year. When I dial to
order, the sales person on the other end is able to identify my name and address from the
phone I’m calling from. Despite the fact that I’ve almost always ordered the same items from
the menu, I’m always prompted to tell them what I want to order this time. It is tedious,
cumber-some and I’m always scrambling to remember the exact name of the pizza I’d ordered
last time.
Could familiarity breed brand love and loyalty?
If only the person at Pizza Hut were to just say “Would you like me to order your usual or do
you want to try something new?”, that would demonstrate that not only do they know my
name, address, but also what I like. Pizza Hut would become my “neighborhood pizza place”
that I love to go to, the people there know me and know what I like. Unfortunately, Pizza Hut
has still not cracked the code to creating customer “wow” through the customer familiarity that
any mom & pop store without similar technological capabilities can provide.
Additionally – the glossy coupons seem to be a total waste of money. Instead, couldn’t the sales
person on the phone be empowered to apply a discount or coupon code on the phone itself?
“You’ve ordered XX pizzas, you will get the YY free! I’m going ahead and applying this coupon to
your order today.” A missed opportunity for choreographing “wow” into the experience. The
risks of experience designs are those associated with any learning curve, and may be
exacerbated by the potential for high negative leverage if poorly done. The reward is customer
preference that is designed, implemented, and managed—preference not for a set of products
and services, but for an institution.
© Rupa Shankar
www.cxpdesign.com

3. About CXP Design
CXP Design (www.cxpdesign.com), founded by Rupa Shankar, is a platform for marketers,
technologists, designers and leaders to discuss and gain a deeper understanding of cross-channel
customer experience design, develop empathy for customer needs and learn how to create
products and services that deliver "wow" experiences for customers.
When we check into a hotel. When we shop on-line. When we buy a pair of shoes. When we get on
a flight. These are experiences by which we measure brands every day. However, most companies
are without the tools to purposefully design those experiences for maximum value. That’s where
CXP Design comes in.
Day in, day out, we live, sleep, eat, breathe and unravel the riddle that is human experience, leading
to more loyal and committed customers for our clients.
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Rupa is an Associate Director at Happiest Minds Technologies (www.happiestminds.com), a next-
generation IT Services & Solutions company at the forefront of Providing Advisory, Implementation and
Managed Services on Social computing, Mobility, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud computing,
Security and Unified Communications. At Happiest Minds, Rupa is responsible for uncovering and
activating innovative digital and social engagement strategies for its clients, spearheading the
development of frameworks and solutions for different industry verticals and enhancing the global go-to-
market strategy. She taps into her past work as both a design practitioner and marketer to help Happiest
Minds clients envision and define broad, end-to-end customer experiences.
© Rupa Shankar
www.cxpdesign.com