An Open Letter to Pizza Hut

Update: 1/6/2012, 7:24 am – The customer satisfaction hotline doesn’t open back up again until 1 pm, and the corporate office is in Texas which is CST, not EST, so no response on either the escalation hotline or the corporate office number. Amazing how customer satisfaction doesn’t even know the timezone of their own corporate office.
Update: 1/5/2012, 9:06 pm – I’ve tried, unsucessfully, to get a hold of a supervisor in the customer satisfaction department for over 3 hours! No one ever came on the line. My original feedback has now been escalated to the area manager for failure to respond in a timely fashion. After more calls than I care to think about tonight (probably in the 20 range), I finally got an internal escalation line and the corporate office number — we’ll see what happens when I call those tomorrow. At no point has anyone taken any ownership of the excessive hold times or the lack of response in the last 4 business days. @pizzahut has now also taken notice of my tweets and my open letter.

Dear Mr. Scott O. Bergren,

I have to say that while Backify had poor customer service by the lack of it, Pizza Hut is now providing poor customer service by not abiding by your own turnaround times on customer feedback. Per my discussion with your customer satisfaction team on Monday (1/2), I was told to expect a 3 business day turnaround. It’s now Thursday night, with no call from the district manager as promised to me on Friday (12/30), when I originally submitted my feedback.

Additionally, the lack of prompt attention to this issue from your customer satisfaction team (after all, how much of a “hotline” is it when the wait time is an excessive 20 minutes?) has only made me even more frustrated. After 5 minutes talking to an actual rep, the individual who took my call told me that the best they could do was send an email directly to the district manager and ask them to respond ASAP. As I was not satisfied with the lack of response for the last 4 days, I asked to speak to a supervisor. After promising me that I would be on hold for a “few minutes”, I was placed on hold.

So far, this call has lasted for over 70 minutes, all but 5 minutes of it on hold. I’ve tried nearly every avenue I can to get this issue the proper attention it deserves, without success.

Although I hate to refer something like this to the CEO of Pizza Hut, I’ve tried every avenue I can to get the feedback to the right person so it can be addressed promptly. As I write this, it’s been 4 business days without a response and I’ve racked up more than two hours on the phone since my original report Friday (12/30) night.

This is not the level of customer service I expect from any business I frequent — regardless of whether it is retail, restaurant, specialty store, or service oriented. If this issue continues to remain un-addressed, I will have no choice but to take my business elsewhere. I will not frequent a business that fails to provide adequate avenues to address concerns and fails to address concerns in a timely fashion.

Please help restore my faith in Pizza Hut’s commitment to its’ customers.