Misti has some advice for Domino’s that perhaps would be wise for other businesses to follow: spending money on marketing is all very well and good, but ultimately pointless if you don’t train franchisees and staff on how to not treat customers like crap.

She had an order gone wrong, with a significantly delayed delivery. The advantage/disadvantage of the company’s new pizza tracker? She could track exactly how long her pizza was sitting around in the restaurant, getting cold instead of being delivered. When she called, the manager of her local Domino’s promised her a free pizza. They put it on her account. Allegedly. Months later, she went to claim the free pizza, and it was gone. Where did it go? No one knows, but the Domino’s wasn’t about to take her word for it.

Feeling that I was perhaps the last person in the U.S. to have not tried the “new” Domino’s pizza, I placed an online order on November 4, 2012 at Store #[redacted] in [redacted]. Using the online tracker, I saw the pizza go through the process of preparation and cooking, then it just sat for 20 minutes before the delivery man left. It then took him another 30 minutes to drive to my house, located a whole 3 miles away. Overall, it took more than an hour to get the pizza to me. When it finally arrived, I refused delivery and called my usual pizza place, which had my pizza here in 20 minutes.

The manager called a short time later and apologized, it was a busy night and someone had called out of work. She offered me a free pizza, which she would put on file for my next order. Things happen, which I understand. Apology accepted.

I finally got around to claiming my free pizza on April 17. I called Domino’s and spoke to [A], who looked up my previous order and said there were no notes on file so there was nothing he could do. When I asked to speak with a manager, he said he was the general manager for that location. Shocked by his complete apathy, I again asked him to honor the commitment made by the previous manager. He said, “If I gave you a free pizza, how would I know that you’d ever order here again?” I responded, “I might have, if you had handled this properly.” I informed him that I would call the corporate office but he didn’t care.

Seriously, what manager tells a customer that it’s their responsibility to prove they will provide repeat business before they honor their own commitment??

I did call corporate customer care, who took my claim and said someone from the location would call me within 3 business days. When I hadn’t heard anything a week later, I called corporate again. She said there were notes on the file indicating the franchise owner had delegated for someone to contact me but whoever that was never made the call. She submitted another request and said I would get a call within 3 business days.

Another week has passed by with no contact so I made another call to customer care, speaking with the same rep I had talked to the week prior. She apologized and said she would take care of it from a corporate level by sending me a gift card. I reiterated that I still want the call from the franchise owner, she understood that my concern was not in compensation but in following up about the service I received.

I have laughed at the recent Domino’s commercials which proclaim that their delivery process now takes longer because they put so much care into the preparation. Do they not realize that they gave us the means of tracking the progress of the order? It took only a few minutes to make my pizza, it was the complicated process of driving 3 miles that took nearly an hour.

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