The list of restaurant chains jumping on the social media-ordering bandwagon continues to grow.
Pizza Hut is the latest high-profile brand to enlist a “chatbot” to launch a social ordering platform that will allow the restaurants customers to place orders for pizza and other products using their Twitter accounts or Facebook Messenger. Yum! Brands’ Pizza Hut announced the new service on Tuesday, revealing a partnership with chatbot startup Conversable, which also recently added Whole Foods Market and fast-casual food chain Wingstop to its list of clients.
Pizza Hut will make the social ordering platform available starting in August, at which point customers will be able to reorder favorite or saved orders from any U.S. location of the restaurant chain by chatting directly with the Pizza Hut accounts on either Twitter or Facebook. There will be no extra charge to order through the chatbot and customers can also get answers to frequently asked questions and access info on recent Pizza Hut promotions.
“The new Pizza Hut social ordering platform is another example of making it easy for our customer to order their favorites from Pizza Hut,” Baron Concors, Pizza Hut’s Chief Digital Officer, said in a statement. “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.
In addition to joining Wingstop and Whole Foods in the social ordering space, Pizza Hut will also be competing for ravenous social media users with Taco Bell’s TacoBot, while Burger King also recently launched a bot that allows ordering through Facebook Messenger. And, it’s likely we’ll only see more and more businesses enabling social ordering, especially through Facebook, which opened its Messenger chat app to businesses last year and began allowing companies to build bots for the service earlier this year.
Of course, one of Pizza Hut’s biggest rivals, Domino’s, has been a pioneer in the areas of social media and mobile ordering, having introduced an ordering system through Twitter more than a year ago. Domino’s was also the first pizza chain to introduce an Apple Watch app to allow customers to order pies from their wrists, earlier this year.
