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A comment on Phone is still the best way to order pizza.

Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by ioman on Sunday January 30, 2022 @08:03AM (#30136815)
My local pizza place in Seattle has moved the technology the other way. Here’s the dialog when I call. “Pagliacci Pizza, how can I help you?” “I’d like to order a pizza” “Sure thing. Is this John Smith?” “Yes” “Do you still live at 1234 Main Street” “Yes” “Would you like to order the same thing you did last time?” “Yes” “Ok, it’ll be there in 20 minutes”

Even better, while you talk to the store you called, the order goes into some sort of pizza load balancer and gives the order to the least busy store with a good drive time to your house.

I’d seriously like to buy/have a beer for/with whoever designed it.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by ratww on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:24AM (#30137428)
In Brazil a lot of people moved to use WhatsApp for ordering, which keeps the history and requires the company to use nothing but a free app everyone already has.

At worse the pizza place has to ask for the address again if they're in a rush.

I find it a quite clever solution.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by tjoff on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:17AM (#30137376)
Sounds good, but "the order goes into some sort of pizza load balancer and gives the order to the least busy store with a good drive time to your house" seems to be optimizing only for fast delivery.

Which might, or might definitely not be the highest priority to me.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by aembleton on Sunday January 30, 2022 @10:38AM (#30138043)
If its a chain - where the quality is roughly uniform, what other metric would you prioritise by?
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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by fortydegrees on Sunday January 30, 2022 @12:21PM (#30138997)
You might not be the person the software was being sold to ;)
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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by lamby on Monday January 31, 2022 @11:00AM (#30149460)
> “Would you like to order the same thing you did last time?”

The next iteration of this clearly for them to call you when you are likely to be hungry (and/or drunk) and ask you this. :)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by sdoering on Sunday January 30, 2022 @08:51AM (#30137181)
Wow. This sounds like an interesting project. Would love to share some coffee with the designer as well.

And in hindsight obvious in times of my phone transmitting my number to the other party.

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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by fragmede on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:10AM (#30137320)
That's just calling a VoIP line so the caller ID comes up on a computer and loads the relevant entry from the CRM including order history, run by an experienced user.
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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by macksd on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:15AM (#30137363)
You say "just" because the technology for doing this isn't novel. It doesn't feel like it's "just" anything when so few businesses bother to even put that much effort towards a good customer experience.
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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by acdha on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:13AM (#30137351)
“Just” probably isn’t the right word: the tools have become easier but it still takes care to integrate all of the pieces to a smooth user experience. For example, no financial institution I’ve ever used has managed to link things that well despite orders of magnitude greater budget.
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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by tjoff on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:19AM (#30137400)
>.[..] despite orders of magnitude greater budget.

That's likely to be the problem. Also, a financial institution has vastly more complex interactions than "same as last time?"

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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by acdha on Sunday January 30, 2022 @10:02AM (#30137758)
Sure, but they can’t even pass my phone or account number around. I’m not saying that the two businesses are comparable in complexity, only that nothing easy happens without someone behind the scenes working on the user experience.
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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by xeromal on Sunday January 30, 2022 @01:26PM (#30139664)
For a pizza user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by remir on Sunday January 30, 2022 @02:47PM (#30140425)
This kind of thing is relatively easy to do on contact center solutions like Genesys.
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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by MAGZine on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:09AM (#30137318)
Jet's Pizza in New York allows you to text in an order, including saying "last order".

... unfortunately its then hooked up to a bad webui to review/complete the order, and their text to data interface is bad at trying to guess what you want unless if you specify things exactly how they're written in the menu.

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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by sdnas211 on Monday January 31, 2022 @03:43AM (#30145875)
My local pizza place (not a chain) does this. But manually. If you call they will ask if you want the usual. Then that is it. No confirmation of address, price, anything.

I can literally call and say "I want a pizza" and unless I want different toppings, that is the whole process.

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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by mcntsh on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:29AM (#30137473)
I'm not sure if Uber Eats/DoorDash are starting to force businesses to stop taking phone orders, but the last few times I tried to call and place an order I was told I need to do it from their website (which was an Uber Eats POS).

Which sucks because then you pay the app fees on top of everything.

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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by thehappypm on Monday January 31, 2022 @11:42AM (#30149994)
Best pizza in Seattle, too.
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Re:Phone is still the best way to order pizza by thorwawayrus53 on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:31AM (#30137490)
> I’d seriously like to buy/have a beer for/with whoever designed it.

I feel this.

[ Parent | on HN ]