Why Pizza and Potholes are the Future of Customer Experience

Sometimes customer experience experts get so caught up in mapping and measuring the customer journey inside their company that they miss the real opportunities. That’s why I love what the pizza chain Domino’s is doing. They are making roads safer for carryout pizzas.

If you haven’t seen the news, here’s the quick story.

Domino’s is asking for nominations at www.pavingforpizza.com. On the site you can recommend that your town receive one of twenty $5,000 grants to fix potholes. While on the site you can see the current count of potholes fixed by city and you can read what town officials are saying about the program. You can also see the effect of road conditions on your pizza. There's an interactive video that allows you to select how bad the road conditions are so you can see the damage to your pizza these roads cause. It might convince you to nominate your town for a Paving for Pizza grant.

Here’s Why "Paving for Pizza" Matters

Domino’s is calling attention to the fact that customer experience is not just about the things their brand can control. There is a gap between product delivery (at the register in the store) and the customer experiencing the product (at the dinner table). Domino's is now taking responsibility for your pizza getting safely to your dinner table. Although potholes may have a minimal effect on the actual quality of your pizza, it shows that Domino's recognizes that once you walk out of their store, their commitment to a quality experience is not yet over.

This isn’t the first time Domino’s has leveraged the opportunities that exist in the carryout experience beyond their doors.

Carryout Insurance? Really??

My wife and I both laughed when we first saw Domino's “Carryout Insurance” advertised in 2017. My wife still shakes her head in disbelief, while I think it is a genius move. Domino’s is taking responsibility for challenges that are beyond their control to help customers have an amazing dining experience.

While you might consider these marketing ploys, I would recommend giving them some deeper thought.

Thinking Beyond Your Walls

In our new book, ProphetAbility: The Revealing Story of Why Companies Succeed, Fail, or Bounce Back, Betsy Westhafer and I encourage executives to think beyond their typical customer journey to consider what is happening in the customer’s life and how they can help the customer solve problems that would typically seem to be outside the scope of the product or service offered. This is exactly what Domino’s is doing.

In ProphetAbility we discuss the behavioral economic concepts of loss aversion and prospect theory which were conceived by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologists. Kahneman and Tversky proved that we feel losses far more than intensely than we feel gains. We are wired to fear and despise the pain of loss and we avoid it at great cost.

We've found these theories can be adapted easily to customer experience. We all know that, when customers receive more than they expect, they are delighted and exuberant. They often write 5-star reviews and become word-of-mouth advocates of our brand.

IMAGE: Prospect Theory adapted to customer experience by Tony Bodoh

But, when customers perceive that they lost out and did not receive what they expected or paid for, they become irrational and angry. If you have ever dealt with (or been) one of these customers, you also know it takes far more than just fixing the problem and giving the customer what they originally expected to return them to a neutral emotional state.

How Domino's Protects Against Losses

Domino's addresses loss aversion by insuring your carryout pizza and by fixing the roads in your town. They go beyond providing a quality product to ensuring that you have a quality experience when the pizza arrives at your table.

This is the future of customer experience: To not only deliver quality products and services but to eliminate the challenges in the gap that exists between the delivery of the product or service and the experience of the product or service.

How can you fix the potholes in your customer's life?

******

Praise for ProphetAbility

"One of Steve Jobs’ principles was to make sure you connect the dots. Tony and Betsy have done a great job in connecting the dots from Ancient Kings to modern day CEOs. One of the major failures of today’s CEO is to not want to disrupt the norm. This book is filled with stories, advice, and support for making sure today’s CEO understands that sometimes disruption is the key to future success. Great advice for any CEO!"

~Jay Elliot, Best-selling author of “The Steve Jobs Way,” and CEO of iMedGo

Preview the book at www.TonyBodoh.com

From the Back Cover of ProphetAbility:

"The most admired CEOs (like the kings of old) win because they master the ability to harmonize two competing forces in their leadership teams: The priests who maintain tradition, structure and order; and, the prophets who hear the unfiltered voice of the customer and promote disruption. 

This book is heralded a "masterpiece" and a "must-read" for CEOs and leaders who want to run a successful customer-centric business because it provides critical insights into the human experience that show what works, what doesn't and why.