Dive Brief:
- Pizza Hut created a new executive position, Chief Customer Officer, and named Helen Vaid as its first ever CCO, the company said in a release.
- Vaid’s role includes overseeing the transformation of the in-restaurant and digital customer experience as well as leading the international e-commerce, technology and operations business. Pizza Hut sees digital ordering as its greatest growth opportunity globally, and the customer journey as “paramount to that experience."
- "One of the key priorities for Pizza Hut has always been putting the customer experience at the heart of everything we do and we think the addition of Helen will represent an even bigger step-change for Pizza Hut all over the world," said Milind Pant, President, Pizza Hut International, in the release. "To truly provide the best customer experience possible, we must make it easier to get a better pizza by boldly approaching the online and offline experience as a whole, and Helen's experience and thought leadership matches perfectly with this vision."
Dive Insight:
By creating the new executive seat and naming Vaid as its first Chief Customer Officer, Pizza Hut is acknowledging that digital technology has turned business into a truly customer-first exercise, and that to be successful, companies need tighter control over the customer experience and how customers are marketed to.
In certain ways, moves like Pizza Hut's are reimagining marketing and customer relations functions that once would have been handled by agency relationships, turning them into core business processes under much tighter internal control. The CCO title is another indicator that brand/agency relationships are rapidly changing in today’s digital world.
"This is an incredible opportunity to build upon the strong foundation Pizza Hut has established in the digital and customer experience arena," Vaid said. "I look forward to further shaping Pizza Hut in a way that provides the best customer experience in the industry.”
Vaid's background includes serving as Vice President of Digital Store Operations & Experience at Wal-Mart, and working at Snapfish — a photo-sharing and printing service company — as general manager. Her new appointment follows Pizza Hut's honed focus on brand-driven digital, as the company recently introduced ordering through a number of channels, most notably chatbots.
