Yea, now the call ahead orders are getting out of control. We will start Friday mornings out with 30 to 40 deferred orders sometimes. We have these 2, 20 year old girls who come in on the busy mornings and do nothing but keep track, time out, and load all of the pre-orders. They have a brain that’s wired up to allow them to keep track of several hundred pizzas that are being made, need made, baking, and all other kinds of varies states of the process. They never misses a single pizza and every order comes out correct and on time. We use to remind them to load this or load that. Their response was always “I know”. Now we just shut up. Our policy now is that at least 1 of them has to be working Thursday and Friday mornings. No one else can do it ( including me ) without chaos.
If the drivers are out, we time the deliveries to go into the oven so they aren’t sitting on the ovens waiting for a driver for longer than 10 minutes or so but we could definitely benefit from having another driver on Friday and Saturday nights. Our competition within 5 miles radius is quite small in regards to mom and pop pizzerias, and the chains in the area of course deliver. Thankfully we only lose maybe 1-2 sales on a Friday night due to high delivery times, as anyone that doesn’t want to wait will pickup and the quote time for pickup is never longer than 30-35 minutes.
In my estimation, half of those delivery customers would pickup if we did not offer delivery but with thoughts of potentially selling in the near future, it doesn’t make sense for us to have that large sales decrease.
We are getting slammed on Friday nights. We get as many pies as we possibly can in the ovens. When the tickets seem never ending though, we are finding ourselves at about an hour and a half for delivery too.
i have found that it is always better to quote longer times and arrive earlier…saves alot of those annoying where is my pizza calls although we are pushing our order tracker app with Foodtec on our on hold messaging which also helps
We are located in a small town and deliver to 3 larger cities that are all located within 5-10 minutes and also have a lot of the country we deliver to. Typically anything in town we tell 35-40 minutes and always anything out of town an hour. Busy times in town 45-1 and out of town 1-1 1/2. Haven’t had to many problems with that. We use to tell out of town 45-1 but people would call us at 45 asking where there food was. So I agree with previous comments on always giving yourself a little extra time. Now I’m curious what you guys do for timed orders. Do you agree on a set time (like 7pm on the dot) or do you agree on a set time frame (7-7:15). Just curious how everyone handles this. We also have procedures typed up by the phones with p/u and del times for normal business, busy and slammed times. And for different pizzas we have different times for each category. As far as pos it keeps track but if one driver is slacking it messes it up. I prefer a typed up procedure and it works well for us. Also having an extra driver on Friday really helps keep it smooth.
As for timed orders, i have always used a ±10 minutes from the requested time. So if they request 7pm, we can be as early as 6:50 or as late as 7:10. There is no way to time it to exactly as requested, specially during busy times.
Thanks for the info. We have added extra drivers, but the back up is in the fryers and ovens. We are producing and cooking the food as fast as we can so, but the ovens and fryers are full and then some! Timed orders are promised for the requested time, as long as it is called in well ahead of time
Original question… How to quote good times… We take the age of the oldest orders on the driver routing screen and add about 15-20 minutes for an estimated time. We usually beat that but better to exceed expectations.
My standard delivery time was 20 minutes, I trained me staff to know if we had more than 4 deliveries to quote 25 minutes more than 8 it was 30 minutes.As the amount of deliveries went up so did our delivery times. The nice thing about living in a small community where nothing was more than 12 minutes away is we could predict times pretty accurately.
Have you looked into a Perfect Fry auto dump fryer? It’s been huge for us. We had some major issues initially but after getting a complete replacement we haven’t had an issue. We also have a second one that hasn’t had any issues either
Take a dartboard… put a clock face on it… stand approx. 8 feet away… choose the blindfold of your liking… grab a dart and chuck it at the board with your non-dominant hand… check results, quote that time! You’re welcome! In all seriousness, we quote anywhere 45 - 2hours on the busiest nights ( depending on our managers stress level probably ) but honestly thats not the focus. The focus is just getting the food there as hot/warm as we can. Even if we’re late but the food is hot most people will completely forget they were quoted 45 but it got it at an hour. We put disclaimers all over our menus that the quoted delivery times are approximate and are not guaranteed. We also specify that pre-orders always take precedence over any other order except for Dine-ins. One trick we’ve adapted to make sure delivery sets are getting dropped at the right times and food is never waiting for drivers is we ask the drivers to text the dispatcher an eta when they are headed back to the store. Works really well!