Domino’s creepy plan to track your every move

DOMINO’S keeps on rolling out the tech innovations. But has the pizza company gone too far this time?

DOMINO’S has unveiled a radical plan to ensure that its pizza is eaten fresh — but there’s a creepy catch.

In the first of its biannual Abacus series of tech innovation events this morning, chief executive Don Meij announced that, from Monday, the company will start tracking customers who place pick-up orders — taking Domino’s GPS tracking technology to its logical conclusion.

“When you place a pick-up order, we don’t know when you’re going to come to the store,” Mr Meij said, after declaring that “time is the enemy of food”.

Standing in front of a screen plastered with an image of a soggy burger wilting french fries, he explained that while driver and pizza tracking were cutting down delivery times, these only made up 40 to 50 per cent of customers.

And those who placed pick-up orders were liable to getting delayed by traffic, phone calls or just simple dawdling, he said.

Get it while it’s hot. Picture: Brendan Radke

But with the new on-time cooking feature on the Domino’s app, customers will be tracked until they get to the store, ensuring their pizza goes into the oven at the ideal time.

“So hopefully you actually arrive just in time for the perfectly hot pizza,” Mr Meij said.

Domino’s chief digital officer Michael Gillespie said the opt-in feature would only retain customer information for the duration of the ordering and pick-up process, according to a “transparent privacy policy”.

If customers felt uncomfortable with the idea, they did not have to use the feature, he said.

Those who ordered on desktop could type in their location to make the most of on-time cooking without the need for a smart phone.

The announcement came during a presentation summarising Domino’s technological advancements to date, including the prized delivery robot Dru, unveiled in Brisbane in March.

Track or be tracked.

While Dru is at least a year away from actually delivering pizzas — with New Zealand to be the first country to trial the service — the invention serves as a symbol of Domino’s hi-tech agenda.

“I hope you can see that we’re not creating gimmicks,” Mr Meij said. “They can cost millions of dollars and be gone in a day ... Once you get data, it just leads to more learning.”

And more potentially valuable information — like that collected through its nightly customer questionnaires, which started with cute questions like “what’s your favourite superhero?” and more recently included a poll on Australia’s preferred prime minister.

“We have that power now,” Mr Meij said, declaring Domino’s to be “Australia’s largest real time poll provider”, with its database of hundreds of thousands of app customers.

“I don’t know any polling system out there that has that kind of reach,” he said. “If you’re in a political party, I’d be hopping on every night.”

Domino's boss Don Meij brings new meaning to the word “hustle”.

CRUNCH TIME

Key to Domino’s technological vision is the simple goal of condensing of delivery time, and Mr Meij believes its data collection will empower the company to make good on its promise of a 10-minute national average.

The ability to spy on workers has allowed the company to narrow down on each stage of the order cycle, and try to make it quicker.

“Our drivers now hustle when they’re being tracked,” Mr Meij said. But tracking the in-store process had revealed that “unfortunately some franchisees told us a time that was inaccurate; our pizza spent more time on the rack and car park than on the road,” a reality he described as “scary”.

“Crunching rack time” and getting drivers moving quicker had allowed Domino’s Palm Beach store on the Gold Coast to achieve a nine minutes and 49 seconds average, he said.

Over the next two-to-three years, the focus will be on expanding this success across Australia, which has a 22-minute delivery average (down from the previous 27 minutes).

Reducing the cooking time will be key, and the company is working on a new oven to reduce this from an average 7.15 minutes to just three minutes.

“Right now, it’s cooking in four minutes,” Mr Meij said.

While robot delivery is at least 12 months away, customers will soon have access to Virtual Dru.

MEET ‘VIRTUAL DRU’

Also around the corner is Zero Clicks delivery, which will set the clock ticking for your favourite order as soon as you launch the stand-alone app — building on the existing feature that allows customers to order simply by typing a pizza emoji.

Then there’s Virtual Dru, a Siri-like voice activated delivery function that will enable customers to simply say “Dru, can I place an order?”

Mr Meij said while 20 per cent of delivery customers and 60 per cent of pick-up customers still ordered the old-fashioned way — over the telephone — a recent survey revealed that 100 per cent would happy to deal with artificial intelligence, rather than a human customer service operator.

“We can see a day where we’d be 100 per cent digital,” Mr Meij said. “If you’re not doing this, you’re going to be irrelevant in the future.”

Domino’s is also launching targeted upselling, using customer data to deliver special offers they’re likely to be interested in.

[e-mail]