New York, Jul 14 (IANS): Pizza Hut has announced a new social ordering platform or "chatbot" which will allow conversational ordering of pizzas and other menu items on Facebook Messenger and Twitter.
The platform, which will be available across Pizza Hut social media accounts from August, will debut at the 2016 Venturebeat MobileBeat Conference in San Francisco with a demo from Baron Concors, Chief Digital Officer, Pizza Hut, the company announced on Thursday.
"The new Pizza Hut social ordering platform is another example of making it easy for our customer to order their favourites from Pizza Hut," said Concors.
"We are constantly pursuing ways to simplify our ordering experience. This platform allows our consumers to quickly order or get information where they are already spending a great deal of their time," he added.
For this, Pizza Hut has partnered with technology company Conversable.
Pizza Hut will be competing against Domino's which introduced an ordering system through Twitter last year. One can order Domino's via Apple Watch app too.
"With this service, customers will be able to reorder their favourites or saved orders from any US Pizza Hut location by chatting directly with the Pizza Hut accounts on Facebook Messenger and Twitter, as well as get answers to frequently asked questions and receive the latest deals and promotions," the company said.
The company sees conversational ordering as an opportunity to interact with this audience on the social platforms of which they are already heavy users to provide a quick, easy ordering experience.
"We are committed to our servicing our customers in the most convenient way and meeting them in the channels they already prefer," Concors noted.
"This launch reinforces our goals of being the most user centered pizza company with an emphasis the simplification and personalisation of our digital experience," he added.
For initial launch, customers will be able to connect their Facebook messaging account to their Pizza Hut account to dramatically reduce the information required to order.
The menus, deals and promotions offered are specific to each store and there is no extra cost to the user to order through Facebook Messenger or Twitter.
Once an order is confirmed, Pizza Hut will email the customer a receipt and an order confirmation message will be sent in the messenger conversation.
From there, picking up the order is no different from the traditional online ordering system or calling into the local store.
"We could not be more excited to demo and launch this new Pizza Hut social ordering experience," said Ben Lamm, CEO and Co-Founder, Conversable.