The Pizza Giants and Customer Service

Customer service is dying a painful and terrible death in America, overall, and the Virginia Peninsula, in particular. At first it exhibited only a slow wound that allowed the value commodity to seep away. However, today, it is a violent open wound that has almost negated the entire concept of customer service altogether.

With all of us having to tighten our belts just to put gasoline in our vehicles for necessary transportation, our retail choices are becoming much more informed. That means that companies who don't get the customer service issue under control could end up going out of business.

My first effort in uncovering the condition of customer service was to compare fast food giants Burger King, Chic-fil-A, Hardees, McDonalds, and Sonic Drive-Ins. If you haven't read that article yet, you might want to check it out before you move on.

This piece focuses on a comparison between some of the pizza leaders regionally and nation wide. They include: Chanellos, Dominoes, Papa Johns, and Pizza Hut.

I based my comparison on five key customer service points, ranking each one on a scale of one to five with one being the worst and five being the best. These included the:

Length of wait time;
Attitude of wait personnel;
Correctness of the food order;
Freshness of the food upon delivery; and
Helpfulness of personnel when presented with a problem.

Based on the company's ratings within each of those areas, I awarded the business an overall grade between A for outstanding to F for complete failure.

Length of Wait Time:

Chanellos is a regional pizza chain that is quite popular in the Virginia Peninsula area. Unfortunately their customer service is inconsistent, at best. Some of their locations are better than others. This is primarily due to the lack of reliable personnel within some of their stores. We tried three different stores located in Hampton, Newport News, and York County. Two of theme were relatively prompt in both taking the order and delivering the pizza. The other one had a long lag time on taking the order and the pizza was never received. SCORE: Two stars