The challenge
Using delivery location intelligence to solve complex delivery challenges
Standard street addresses often don’t give delivery drivers the context they need for large or multi-unit locations, like campuses, military bases, hospitals, and hotels. Pizza Hut’s digital ordering team, which supports customers from checkout to fulfillment across the web, mobile, and call-center channels, needed a way to close that gap without creating friction for delivery drivers or customers.
Leona Taylor, Director of Product for Digital Ordering Experience at Pizza Hut, leads the ongoing evolution of those experiences. Alongside Himansu Behera, Senior Product Manager for Order, Pay, and Fulfill, and Madi Nance, Product Owner for Fulfillment and Tracking, she works to make digital ordering and fulfillment more accurate, intuitive, and reliable across web, mobile, and call-center channels.
One area of focus was localization: helping customers identify where they wanted to order from and ensuring Pizza Hut had the location information needed to fulfill orders reliably.
Pizza Hut’s existing Google Maps setup supported core localization, but the team wanted to create a more flexible foundation for future growth. This involved recognizing what the team calls “dwellings”: complex location types that often require more delivery context than a standard street address alone.
For example, a customer may be ordering to an apartment community, university campus, military base, hospital, or hotel. The address they input likely identifies the broader location, but does not always provide the context a driver needs to complete the delivery smoothly.
Delivery location intelligence solves these complex delivery challenges by recognizing when an address belongs to a larger, harder-to-navigate location, like an apartment complex, campus, or military base, and surfacing the context a driver needs to complete the delivery.
As the team evaluated alternative solutions, Radar emerged as a strong fit. Pizza Hut tested the platform using real-world localization examples and found that it matched the precision and accuracy of its existing provider, without degradation. Radar also offered the dwelling-recognition capabilities Pizza Hut needed, giving the team confidence that it could improve the localization experience while providing a more cost-effective path to scale.
“Being able to pinpoint military bases, apartments, and universities stood out to us. That detail was extremely important for improving accuracy for our delivery drivers.”
—Leona Taylor, Director of Product for Digital Ordering Experience
The solution
Improving checkout and delivery accuracy with flexible address entry and precise location data
To begin, Radar provided the Pizza Hut team with one-to-one mapping documentation to help migrate their localization services and SDK integrations. Himansu described the process as smooth and straightforward, with the first phase of the migration completed quickly. The team then rolled out the implementation in phases, using Radar dashboards to monitor API activity, traffic, and performance throughout.
Pizza Hut now uses Radar to power localization across web, mobile, and call-center ordering. The platform gives customers multiple ways to pinpoint complex delivery locations, then uses that data to add the context drivers need to confidently and successfully complete delivery.
To identify complex locations, customers can enter a street address and, using Radar’s location data, Pizza Hut will recognize when that destination belongs to a relevant dwelling type and flag that context in the delivery details drivers receive.
Customers can also search by place name, like a university, dormitory hall, or campus building. And for particularly large properties, they can use a draggable map pin to indicate a more precise location. Pizza Hut then uses Radar’s reverse geocoding capabilities to translate the selected point into an address.
This helps drivers better understand the type of location they are navigating to and increases the likelihood of a successful delivery. As a result, Himansu and Leona are seeing more positive customer feedback on delivery accuracy, fewer address-related support issues, and a reduction in localization costs.
Beyond delivery, Pizza Hut also uses Radar Maps to make carryout more straightforward. With its post-order carryout tracker, customers can see their restaurant’s location, open directions in their preferred navigation app, and find the right location more easily.
Throughout the partnership, Leona, Himansu, and Madi have all been impressed by Radar’s hands-on, responsive approach. “Working with Radar has been awesome. We feel truly taken care of and prioritized, with an open line of communication whenever we have questions or concerns,” shares Madi.
Radar’s collaborative support has given Pizza Hut the confidence to scale the localization experience across its high-volume ordering environment.
“We were looking at how to enhance accuracy and evolve the customer experience. Radar stood out as a solution that could help us modernize localization and scale.”
—Himansu Behera, Senior Product Manager for Order, Pay, and Fulfill
The results
Pizza Hut reduces app localization failures by 10x
With Radar, Pizza Hut now has a stronger foundation for its digital ordering journey. By pairing reliable technology with more flexible location intelligence, the team is converting more delivery orders, seeing fewer localization failures, and spending less to do it.
- 4% higher conversion rate for delivery orders
- 10x reduction in app localization failures
- 33% reduction in web localization failures
- $250K+ cost savings from previous maps vendor
- Decrease in address-related support tickets
Looking forward, Pizza Hut is continuing to build on its localization foundation as it evolves digital ordering and fulfillment. With a successful implementation in place, the team is excited to explore additional Radar capabilities that could create even better customer experiences over time.
“With Radar, we have a partner who listens to our challenges and addresses them in a timely manner. That kind of responsiveness helps us keep improving the experience as our needs evolve.”
—Leona Taylor, Director of Product for Digital Ordering Experience
