Michael Gillespie: It wasn't the norm to order tangible goods on the Internet in those days. It was, you know, and I've talked about this recently to a few people. Someone did laugh at me when I was saying I got to work to dominate to sell pizza on the Internet. No one in a business has all the questions or all the answers. Data is so powerful, you can democratize it. There's an experience that's best practice for your particular business. And you can take what people say is industry best practice, but that would be ideas you have to validate if that's going to work for your customer and work for your e commerce solution.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, the podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of e commerce. Every month, Nathan Bush from 12 High and an E commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game. And of course, keep your customers adding to Cart. Yeah, that's. That's correct. Double anchovies, double pineapple, thin crust. Yep, I'm sure. Okay. Yeah, throw in the brownies as well. Thank you. Hello, and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and e commerce consultant at 12 high. Could you imagine managing an e commerce business that generates $2.4 billion every year? 2.4 billion. That's five times the size of Kogan. Well, joining me today is someone who does exactly that, Michael Gillespie. Michael is the group Chief Digital and Technical Officer at Domino's Pizza based here in Brisbane. He joined me shortly after Domino's released their annual results, where they announced strong growth in all their markets and in E commerce across Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Europe. In our conversation, we covered how Domino see platforms such as such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo as acquisition opportunities rather than competitors, how Covid has forced them to move from agile to super agile, and how they use AI to solve their biggest customer complaint. My pizza doesn't look like I thought it would. Domino's haven't traditionally shared a lot outside of press releases and ASX announcements, so I was really grateful for the opportunity to bring you this discussion. So let's get straight into it. Thanks to our partners, Shopify plus and Signet. Here's my conversation with Michael Gillespie from Domino's Pizza. Michael Gillespie, welcome to Add to Cart.
Michael Gillespie: Thanks for having me, Nathan.
[Voiceover]: Pleasure. Thank you. I think we ran into each other in Melbourne, of all places, in February. We shared a panel before everything went. Went crazy. So it's nice to be here Talking to you on the other side of it. Well, during it.
Michael Gillespie: Yeah. Well, it's a lot changed since that time. A lot's changed very quickly.
[Voiceover]: Well, we're going to get into that, so. But before we do, can you just give our listeners a brief overview on yourself and your role at Domino's because you've been there quite a while now.
Michael Gillespie: Yeah, so I've been at Domino's probably close to 13 years or up. I'd say this tour of duty is probably closer to 12 years now. Around 12 years in my role I've had various or at Domino's I've had various roles. Starting originally, I think we were about four or five of us in the marketing team and my component was look at digital and help make this online ordering world work. And that was Alan Collins had just joined us as well and he was looking after the brand and the product and we had a small team there and over time obviously the brand and the product's grown and also so has the digital side of the business. And I've been lucky enough to be within a Brisbane business that has now got a multi billion dollar e commerce Engine Running in 8 different markets around the world and going from that early days of knowing pretty much if we were 10 or 20 orders different overnight to insane numbers compared to those days in growth. It's been a great journey and thankfully now I found myself in a position on our leadership team where I oversee in a chief Digital Technology Officer's role the strategy and insights of the data bi area of our business, the story ops and innovation area which is you might see a camera that oversees pizzas and checks the quality of it. We've recently spoken about a cognitive rostering solution using machine learning to help our stores get more ideal rosters to the digital platform experience across all our markets, shared platform in all our markets and the IT function for our business which supports not only a bespoke digital backend but also keeps our 2,600 plus stores live 24. 7 around the world and provides support and IT services to those and to our head office. So a little bit different to the early days. But yeah, been a great journey.
[Voiceover]: Sounds easy. Sounds like you don't have much on
Michael Gillespie: your plate just a little bit, but that's fine.
[Voiceover]: Tell us about those early days because I still remember the days of it was normal to call up your local restaurant and have to go pick it up yourself like the options weren't there like they are today. Tell us about those early days of online pizza delivery and ordering what do you remember?
Michael Gillespie: So I guess for us that was back 2006, probably to about 2006 to 2009 era. And I had a small little, what I'd call maybe a sabbatical where I went away and worked for Virgin for a little while and came back. But those early days, still, it's a while actually, if you think about it, it's quite a while ago in digital terms or tech terms. And it wasn't the norm to order tangible goods on the Internet in those days. It was, and I've talked about this recently to a few people. Someone did laugh at me when I was saying, I'm going to work to Domino's to sell pizza on the Internet. But to me, you could see the application, you could see how ordering online could enhance the experience because pizza is a very unique product. You can vary in billions of different ways because all the different toppings, the bases, the variations in quantities, that you can have a particular topping to do that over the phone. And if you recall, or if you have called a pizza shop in the last decade or any order over a phone, there is noise in the background. There's no way you can ask the store member at the other end to go through every menu item, recall all those items and then customize. That's something that digital let you do in those days. And we were very passionate about. It had to be. If you were going to do it online, it had to be a unique and differential experience than just a menu. And it had to be rich in visuals because food is a visual product. You look at food and you just have the need to see whenever that was five, six, seven years ago, when the whole Instagram taking photos of everything you ate was around. People love the look of food and that adds appetite appeal. So even in those days, we looked at how we could push the boundaries for the customer with technology where it made sense. And one of those was we chose Flash as our first E commerce solution, which was a rarity in those days for an E commerce platform, was more for games. And why we chose Flash is we could make this really enriched experience visual. You know, we could have the elements to edit where we wanted them first. With HTML in those days, it was could be quite checkered depending on the experience and the browser you were using. So there were elements there that we could choose from a fashion library, it might load a little bit quicker than HTML. So it was something where we're always thinking, how do we really lift this experience and give people unique reason to order online? Because People were still like, why would you order pizza on the Internet? And then beyond that, start overlaying things. Like, not only easy to customize, but using information that we captured an operational level and putting our front end on it, calling Pizza Tracker so we could actually give people an experience that they could only have if they stayed on the phone to the store the whole time that pizza was being made and delivered. And that was impossible. But with the Internet and the customer placing the order, we could take information from the store and represent it in a digestible way to say, with Pizza Tracker, here is your pizza. It's been placed, it's now cooking, it's cooked, it's on its way to delivery, it's ready for pickup. So for us, it was finding our way, because there weren't really any other QSLs doing it, but finding out, forging a way that was with the customer in mind. And then from there, it just organically grew with changes.
[Voiceover]: Do you remember a particular moment where you went, oh, digital is going to be at the core of this business?
Michael Gillespie: Yeah, definitely. And it was 2009 when we released our iPhone app, I think, for us. And it also backed our decision. And, you know, I'm very lucky at it. You know, if you look at, and if you've ever met Don or heard Don speak, and he's been a great supporter of always challenging ourselves to do better. And also, technology was going to be the future in our business or one of the pillars of our business. We're by no means a technology company. We're still a food company and a pizza company at heart, because our core product is the reason people come to us, but that we could use technology to enhance that experience in store and also for our customers. So we have this support and it's great. And they know you've been in digital roles. If you've got a supportive. If you've got support from the top, it makes things a lot easier, but it doesn't say everything's easy. And in those days, digital was still emerging for us as a unit of a sales platform. And if I think back, we had a path to follow where mobile was getting bigger and there was voices from outside the business. Also internally, we should just go on mobile web site because everyone's got a mobile phone. But some of us internally, we're very passionate about. That's not going to give a customer a great experience because. Because mobile websites back in 2009 weren't great. They were checkered. Website speeds were over the phone, web speeds over the Phone were slow. A lot of the time people had very limited data. But with the iPhone most people were getting decent data plans and decent speeds and they were completing M commerce without even realizing it because they were buying via the app store or getting songs on itunes. So for us we could make this visually rich experience that could download some of it into an app. So it wasn't all these loading. We could control the visual experience on there and have a 10, 20 times better customer purchasing process and experience than we could do on web mobile, web. So we went after the iPhone and for us the iPhone I think it was about a million cells pushing my memory. I think in two months we saw a competitor overseas launch with a much bigger population and they took three months to make a million. And even then with the app we thought it can't be heavy. In those days it was 10 meg I think the limit we had to find a way of putting this, all this in 10 meg because we didn't want people to say, oh here's an app. Because people still talk about apps at parties. I don't think anyone does it anymore. It doesn't happen to me. But you know, you go, oh I want to download it. But we didn't want people to go home, have to plug in, try to download it off there.
[Voiceover]: Yep.
Michael Gillespie: Laptop. We wanted instant download, sync your itunes account. Yeah, all those old things you had to do and you know, it really clicked for us the take up rate of that app and that only brought greater awareness of ordering online. And then the whole digital platform, if you look at our results is then year on year just had this tremendous growth. And for us it also set about that time was when we realized we were creating a platform that could be shared globally to other markets. And domino's has gone and taken over more markets since then. And we thought we can't have all these markets in discrepancy countries running different platforms. It doesn't make commercial sense. And if we're building a platform for ordering pizza and optimizing it, imagine the optimization we could get when we could get exposed to multiple markets. So it was around that time both of those things happened. The iPhone app really took off and really cemented that digital is the way forward for our business in transaction process, in the way customers will transact with us. And we also realized that we were creating a platform that was transferable to other markets and slightly refinable so that we could unify. And for me, just after that was a, you know, the business asked me to take more of A global ownership over the platform. So, yeah, I'd definitely say 2005 was a short one.
[Voiceover]: And do you still see apps as important today, our viewers?
Michael Gillespie: I think the great thing about apps is it offers a closed ecosystem for an experience for a customer. The one thing though, we're really trying to be throughout our whole digital journey, since we've had most platforms covered in the early days, obviously web was really the only starting point is continuing to offer choice. Some people still like to get behind their laptop and order a pizza, lunch or dinner, or some people still like to go buy a mobile website. Whether some people still a lot of people like to go buy the app. So our belief is to offer the experience that a customer wants to make us within arm's reach of that customer so they can pick up a digital device in order if we can. We'll try to enhance different experiences based on the platform they're on. But we haven't entered in the past been as prescriptive to say this is the only way to order. We want to say here are all the ways to order and you order the way you want. And obviously over time we'll continue to expand and make each experience tailored to that platform.
[Voiceover]: Tropeaka is an Australian nutrition brand born on Shopify back in 2016. Such a long, long time ago. Four years later, volumes have increased. B2B has become a priority, and it was time to scale. This meant a transition from Shopify to Shopify plus. And what a transition it was. With the addition of personalized discounts, cart optimizations and a custom checkout, Tropeaka were able to increase their average order value from $89 to $94 across 15,000 orders per month. That is a sign of a very healthy partnership. To read more of Tropeaka's story and see other case studies, visit the customer section on shopify.com au+ so if we go from those early days of Flash websites and being one of the first apps on the itunes store, you released your recent results two weeks ago now. And phenomenal results. Congratulations. So the headline figures for those playing at home is. Is Domino's did $2.4 billion worth of digital sales. That's 2.4 billion, which is just a phenomenal number and now represents 72% of total sales. So digital sales represent 72%. So that's a big increase even on the last five years where digital sales were less than half. So obviously the dominant way of ordering now is digital. So congratulations on those results. And what about that growth? And if you look at the report. Some of those growth charts are phenomenal across revenue and profit. Is there any part of you that releases those results and then go, oh, shit, how am I going to top that again next year?
Michael Gillespie: Yeah, I think we're obviously last year we've come out with some quite strong results. It's not lost on us as a business. There's some companies that have that without recent Covid events would have had strong results and have struggled. So we know in ourselves that it's been a privilege to be able to be operating over the last six or seven months of what was that? Half of the financial year that's just occurred. And one thing I'm incredibly proud of from a Domino's employee perspective, is the whole business got behind. How do we deliver results like this and how do we continue to be connected with the community to make sure that, you know, one thing beyond the results is we gave away thousands or tens of thousands of pizzas to local communities who were operating because we knew the challenges of what it was to operate as a business in our markets when there were tight restrictions, when team members are having to go to work with high infection rates. So we were giving pizzas away to hospitals, medical centers, even retailers, other retailers that were operating because it was a very different environment than anyone was used to. And for us, behind the results was also we had to challenge ourselves on how our platform interacted with customers and how our service methods were. What service methods we offered I'm proud of as well. We're very proactive in going well as we saw Covid advancing. How do we ensure that we're providing services that are safe for our customers and team members and take the forward foot or front foot on contactless or what we call zero touch delivery and pickup. How do we do that and send a message to customers that we have these two new service methods and that they're there for the safety of themselves and their delivery drops. Then how do you do that? When you add a whole new or add two new service method options to an ordering platform overnight, almost you're adding at a store tech level, how do we communicate and make sure that message is visible in store systems? At a store level? And those were challenges, but the business rose, the team rose to that challenge. The technology group that I oversee rose to those challenges. And thankfully for the business, we came out with quite a positive result. Digital itself, the numbers you shared, I think it's 2.357 billion now in online sales. And we didn't share the transaction number. But you can imagine on the ticket that's a lot of transactions, especially when most of those transactions happen at peak, at dinner. The numbers that we see now are something that just, I look back to those old days and sometimes you look back to the old reports that came through or run a report of the amount of transactions you would do in a day or in a 15 minute period back in the early days and you just like, wow, it has had a tremendous journey.
[Voiceover]: So tell us about those new initiatives you rolled out. And I'm really keen to hear about the process inside an organization like Domino's, where you do have thousands of employees and franchises to look after as well as all these customers. Tell us about the process of how you mobilize such a large organization to change something that is at the core of your business, like fulfillment options.
Michael Gillespie: Yes. So it's a blur that whole six months. But I can, you know, in saying it's a blur, it's more a blur of speed rather than I can still remember how we did it. And if you, for Dominoes and for listeners, I think I covered at the start it's, you know, we're a nine market business and we've got businesses we're in Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Japan, London, Luxembourg and Denmark. And with the horrible COVID 19 pandemic, each of those markets were impacted in different ways. Each of those countries were and at different stages, they had different levels of restrictions, different challenges that were local. What was one unified challenge was or not least challenge, one unified direction that we had is we'll be as proactive as we can in providing solutions that put our customers and our team members in the safest possible position. And then when you're trying to roll out, as you said, new service methods across multiple markets in different languages. And we all know to try to change consumer behaviors hard enough at the best of times, we had to pretty much overnight launch new service solutions and then on a multi billion dollar system spanning over different markets, the risk of deploying those systems and breaking something and then the financial risk of breakage when you're developing software fast is high as well. So we really had to challenge ourselves over how. What are the ceremonies and processes to release technology software? How do we get an mvp? But mvp, a minimal viable product done faster than ever before. How do we align markets and leaders? We're going with this direction and we will polish it and improve it over the next subsequent weeks. Because originally, to be honest, my team came to me and we were looking at a six week lead time to get Zero Touch in. And at that time, Covid was still a bubbling risk to the world. If it took six weeks, it just wouldn't have been feasible for voice, you know, viable for our business. So we really had to go. Six weeks isn't an option. How do we do it in a matter of days and, you know, rise to that occasion and yeah, really find. How do you get fast answers in alignment when you, when you can't be market with people? How do you, how do you say this meeting's just not needed or how do we cut down this meeting time? How do you go, okay, we'll go with user experience and rapidly develop it during. When it's already out there to the market and the team were open to it. And I think what the proof's in the pudding that we did get these systems live and we just replicated. We took learnings that we took from Zero Touch pickup and Zero Touch delivery where the listeners haven't used it. It's where you don't have any contact with the delivery driver or the team member that you're picking up a pizza from. What we also have launched recently using those learnings is a rapid release of a service called Carpath Delivery from Melbourne. So obviously it's horrible was happening down in Victoria with the, with the increased rates of COVID and therefore, you know, in a very short time became new restrictions again. So it was okay. How do we get a rapid development of a service that we're already working on into the hands or into stores online for Victorian customers so that they don't even need to get out of their car now to pick up a pizza. We will bring it to their car and deliver it to them in a safe manner. And we did that in a matter of, I think from conversations late night on a Friday night. So I think we had the first doors out that following week and then the whole Melbourne market out earlier the following week after that. And these are, you know, Domino's has a reputation of working incredibly quickly, but we just found a whole new level on deliverables and really worked on how to. And had a great marketing team locally in all our markets to be able to cleanly communicate to customers that we were adding these new methods as well, because communication is also important.
[Voiceover]: That's what I was going to say because Domino's and your team, you're known as one of the first uptakes of doing agile really well in Australia and moving really fast. Is there any moment during this Covid where you have changed your ways of working that you went oh gosh, I wish we changed this earlier. As in like any specific parts.
Michael Gillespie: Yeah, I think, I think we're still finding out finding our feed on like somebody we're trying to. I'm trying to expose my team to a few different tech leaders and companies views over how the world's gone as well because there's just so much. I was talking to someone recently and I don't think there's any executive management course or any educational solution out there that could ever train a lot of the leaders and managers and team members in in what they've learned over the last six months. But when you have a rapid level of learning over that period of time, we've got to be able to step back and go okay, what is, what is a sustainable level of delivery speed? What are these new processes and how do we educate the team on this is how we now deliver and we're still going through that stage right now. Like as I said, like the process that we did for car park delivery took the learnings that we did for Zero Touch and rolled it out and yet again we're doing it in days and we're probably just more fluent in that delivery because we'd gone through it previously with Zero Touch. Now we're going okay, we're entering other projects challenging okay, how do we get these answers as fast as we did during the peaks of when we're adding services in Covid how do we are there ceremonies and processes where we can limit the time of discussion? Are we more comfortable now Even in the past we're fine. We're comfortable of MVP or anything we release we refine over time. But are there views that we could probably go larger scale rollouts and be more comfortable and do a stage two and three as quick followers where we might have done stage two and one together. So haven't fully quantified exactly or qualified what exactly would take from that time but I'm seeing parts of that new formed knowledge and forge into our DNA of what makes us as a business already changing the way we deliver. So I think if we talked again in six months I'd probably have to say yeah, we would take. Well a great example is we have also been laying found that we're on a. We're in a system that, that you know that's a bespoke solution that's been built over years and in the past it would take quite a while to roll out a payment method because there's bespoke integration. We laid a foundation with a partner, a payment partner in Europe through Adyen, to more easily add payment methods when we're in the middle of COVID when cash out of one particular market, Germany was pretty much not used because of COVID risk. We had to quickly, rapidly integrate a payment method. And in the past they could take up to three months integration in a bespoke solution. And we did that in less than a month or around a month. I think we wanted three weeks from memory. We were already then not just looking at payment solution, I mean, not just service methods, we were adding payment solutions in a record speed as well. That also excites the team because they're able to deliver more faster and there's nothing that the tech team want to see more is their work out there and see the difference it makes. So we've got a lot of examples to draw and we're taking bits of that and applying it to current projects and then we'll find our feet like anything in six months. I'll say this is all we've taken so far. But it's a journey we'll keep refining. We'll keep finding ways to live faster and faster. But
[Voiceover]: it's amazing when you see how fast you can work. And every time we've caught up, you're like, oh, we're moving so fast. And you absolutely are. And when you push that extra little bit further, it's like you can always find ways to move faster and do better, can't you?
Michael Gillespie: Correct. It's all about challenging yourself 100%.
[Voiceover]: Now, from a customer perspective, we've seen a whole change of behavior and you would have seen change of behavior during COVID And there was lots of talk even pre Covid around services such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo being challenges to you and your market share. How has that played out over Covid and do you see these services as competitors to Domino's?
Michael Gillespie: Yeah. So I think something that a lot of your listeners may not be aware of is the aggregation space isn't a new space for Domino's. It's relatively new industry within the Australian market. But if you look at Europe, like the Netherlands, it's 10 plus years we've been working with aggregators and for us, it's probably a benefit to be a multi market or an international business is that we get exposed to different solutions sometimes earlier if they come out in other markets. And with aggregators. Our view on aggregators is it's an acquisition channel and it's a channel not too dissimilar to Like a Google space, there's a cost per acquisition for that order. We're very proud that we did the deliveries on those platforms as well. And by deploying learnings that we've got out of the European market for us, we've been able to have a playbook from day one in Australia with the aggregator space and treat them in a very similar way. So hopefully that's a win for customers because yet again, they can find us on whatever platform they would like to find us on. We can control the delivery service of it and we're quite a data driven business. So we can look at each of those individual aggregators against other advertising channels and ensure that that cost per acquisition number is within a comfort level for our business. So yeah, I think it's just having another arm of lead generation.
[Voiceover]: It's a really interesting way of looking at it as an acquisition plague. And I think a lot of other retailers, even if they're not in the food space, can take something from that. Whether it's other marketplaces like ebay or Amazon or whatever using them, could you potentially see them as acquisition channels rather than competition? And I can imagine that you are sitting on a gold mine of customer data there over, you know, 16 years that you've been in this space. Having people log on using mobile apps, having their own accounts, the email marketing that you send. What does mature customer data look like for you? What's your approach to using this data effectively?
Michael Gillespie: Yeah, so I guess we're a business that has a tremendous amount of, as you said, data that's built up over time and that's not just in the customer space, it's also in the operational space. And for us, having a large data set in a customer space, it's a privilege to get data. And I think. Well, I know something about Domino's is our view is that we've got to use the data, right? We've got to make sure that if a customer is willing to provide information about themselves, that then over time are using that data to enhance their experience, make their experience easier or more beneficial. So we'll continue to hopefully use data to give more focus messages to customers. We'll continue to use store level data to look at how we enhance customer experience through operational improvements. And a great example of that is cognitive rostering that we've just rolled out nationally in Australia, where because of the large data set we're on, we're able to build or work with machine learning to build solutions that can give stores a future view of the world. Sales wise so they can get more accurate rosters. And you know, that really is how dominoes have got to sit back and go, we're on a lot of data, but how do we drive the greatest value out of that data? Either if it's in a consumer level that the consumer feels that data is being valued at their end and we know it's being valued at our end, or if it's at an operational level that we're not just using data for data's sake. Because I think you would know very well as well. There's not a day goes by that one business will email you or hit you up on LinkedIn or call you directly to sell you that they can make your data do everything done. Now the reality, I think we spoke about this on the panel, it's very hard to find solutions. You can just plug your data in and does everything you want. Everything's got something customization. And also if you're just plugging things in to solve problems that don't exist or to get answers that you don't want, is that really what you need? You may not need everything under the sun. And one thing that domino's I believe is being very strong, great at is it's had a vision over. If we're going to we have this challenge, can we use our data to help solve for it? Rather than let's just do machine learning and see what the data throws or let's just throw customized messages to customers even if but what message do they want to receive? How do they want to receive it? And that's really something we spend a lot of time understanding.
[Voiceover]: And that's one of the things that I've found, especially with larger organizations is the trouble with data is that you can employ data scientists and analyze the data endlessly. But if you don't know the right questions to ask or if you're not aligned as a leadership team on what questions you're asking of that data to get to an outcome. There's a lot of work that can be done for no result. How do you align around what questions you are going to answer with the data?
Michael Gillespie: Well, I think one thing that we're making a lot of work on is democratizing data as well. Now that's not personal data, that's just democratizing the top level data. So actually trends and dashboards and giving power. No one in a business has all the questions or all the answers. If you can democratize data is so powerful. If you can democratize it and make it put it in the Hands of end users from a top level visualization perspective, they can start asking questions or uncover answers that no one, whether in a group strategy and insights role or a local marketing role, may not have the time or may not just notice some particular items we're really looking at. Okay, well how do we create more self service dashboards from a top level information? Something we've just done in Europe is we've given accessibility to that team and rolling out in other markets digital dashboards that are quite in depth but can cross reference market results and can over time give alerts on changes. That's not only taking away time that would normally take to manually build those reports, it's giving some of those analysts more time to uncover insights, uncover opportunities and then challenge either my team or they can do something locally at their level to enhance more value in the business. So I think it's about businesses that over time I'm very passionate about. Don't see data as a throne you want to sit on that. Actually see data as in it's okay to give non personal data, but give data that gives insights into the business accessible to a broad group of team members or everybody. Then you've got a lot more views and a lot more eyeballs and a lot more questions that can be asked.
[Voiceover]: And I assume that it just becomes part of the culture.
Michael Gillespie: Yeah, Domino's is an entrepreneurial, challenging culture and anyone can put their hand up and ask a question about anyone else's team or view and it's all about what is going to drive the business forward. And I think for us it's if we're on a mountain of data, let's try to make that more accessible to the people so they can help us more questions or solve some of their answers themselves as well rather than actually get a customer report. That then takes up time where we could be spending more time working on our machine learning solutions or even and I say ML, not everything has to be an ML AI solution with data these days there are rudimentary solutions that can solve your problems and give as well. If you just go down AI solution for everything, you'll just be spending a lot of money.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, but I do want to touch on one. What you've done is you've actually taken AI and you've got a real life example with your DOM Pizza checker, which I think is fascinating in what I was reading about it. To answer that number one complaint from a customer of my pizza doesn't look like the picture. And I think it's great that You've got a really practical use of AI. Can you tell us a little bit more about how DOM works and what came first, the technology or the idea?
Michael Gillespie: So that's a great project and we work with a partner called Dragon Tail on that project. And I think would you say what came first? So I think the challenge of the business was or a business challenge or a business problem always existed with as you said, my pizza's not great or my pizza's bad. And we have great customer service teams and local marketing teams around the world that will answer those questions and get back to the customer quickly. But the best way to solve for that issue is to prevent it versus prevention versus actual dealing with the issue post. And so apart the Dragon Tower had technology or was working on technology that potentially help us in that space. So we work with them to how do we deliver that in the pizza industry and how do we look? And for those who don't know, it uses real time image recognition to assess the quality of a pizza and also tell the pizza maker the score. Which is great because I'll put my hand up and say I'm not the best maker when I spend time in the store. But yeah, you know, when you're making the pizza you want to go around and see what score you get to validate. Although then probably the better pizza I make, the slower it is. So that's probably not, you know, it's interesting how many something last time I built one so that was pretty good. We had our, you know, but stores will make those in seconds and put me to shame and get 100 and high 90s. So I probably took about five times as long to make that pizza then many of our team members. But you know, it's great. It's actually interesting. We had our Japan CIO down and we showed him the technology because we haven't got that in Japan yet. And he was taking a photo of his score as well. So it almost gamifies the experience of making a pizza. But not to trivialize it. It's a valuable component of checking that quality and then being transparent to the customer. If we're going to remake it, it's not the quality we want. We're remaking that and communicating that to the customer and even that I think some companies wouldn't even be open enough to say it wasn't the right quality. They'll just quickly remake it and deliver it. We're open to say it's not good quality. We're going to remake that and we'll get it to you soon. So it's yet again I think as you said we are using AI there for a commercial reason. We're not saying we just started taking photos of our feature and assessing the quality we need to continue growth, continue, reduce, churn and one way is making sure we're getting you the hotter, fresher pizza as fast as possible and the highest quality pizza and that gives a new level of visibility and eyesight that goes beyond what we would be able to store. Be able to assess and count the pepperoni or make sure it's made perfectly at that rate where it can do it in an instant just enhances the cognitive or enhances the ability of our team members.
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Michael Gillespie: with the experience online and ensuring that we give customers choice to add new products or enhance the enhance the product they're looking at. You know I had the you know as part of well the early days where we launched the first upsell or pop up on our on our online platform and trying to remember I think it was around the state of origin and and Alan Collins, a guy called Todd Rowley who's our CMO now in Japan and myself were talking about how we could enhance selling. I think it was Coke during state of origin or you know people like to buy drinks at that time and you know we just put a pop up there and obviously the rest is history. Now that you know we are known for a lot of upselling during the process. Now in saying that we're very focused on our numbers, we look at our conversion, we look at the ticket average and we at look we want to ensure that we're not putting something in front of it tells a story straight away. If the product isn't being taken up on the upsell or so forth, your customers aren't. It's either going to affect ticket or it's going to impact conversions. So we monitor, adjust for that. But over time I think people always ask not always but some people do ask me about it and I've always been a firm believer even back when I worked for QBD and backward budget days there's an experience that's best practice for your particular business. And you can take what people say is industry best practice, but that would be ideas you have to validate if that's going to work for your customer and work for your e commerce solution. And I firmly believe there's things called positive and negative friction. Sometimes you can have a little bit of friction if the customer feels they're getting a deal or a benefit. And that might be one more step or two more steps, but the commercial benefit and the customer benefit far outweighs those two steps. So it's a balancing act for sure. But one thing is we just continue to look at data, continue to refine and make sure that it's a value the upsell that that customer is getting. And yeah, it's something that has become part of our platform because I think
[Voiceover]: too some people can or some business can really stress that there's too much going on for the customer, whether it's too much email, too many pop ups, too much upsell, too much cross sell, but they're leaving money on the table as well. So to your point, it's just what's the data telling us? The data will soon tell us if we're pushing it too hard.
Michael Gillespie: Correct. You got to validate if it. You'll easily be able to validate if it's too much and if you're unsure. The great thing about digital is you can test the 5% of your customers or 10% of your customers or 1% of your customer, depending on the volume you have. And as long as you're comfortable that you're getting a broad enough coverage of numbers to get a reasonable answer, you don't have to risk your whole customer base on an idea.
[Voiceover]: So my kids love it when your delivery guys rock up on their E bikes. Do you think we're getting any closer to robots or drones as delivery as normal?
Michael Gillespie: Yeah, well Domino's are from a history standpoint has delivered to customers via robotic ground based vehicles and drones before. We made history in New Zealand with some deliveries in Auckland and also in Hamburg. We delivered for quite a period of time ground based with a partner called Starship. So we did the partner flirty in New Zealand with the drones in the air and we worked with a partner Starship on the ground in Hamburg. Now for us ultimately we'll work within the realms of what's possible within each of our markets. And for us I think we've got a great operations and also Ops innovation team have looked at solutions that aren't just in a robotic space to get efficient delivery. And E bikes are a great example of that. Where we know as a business, whether it be when we and over time deliver by any other method other than the car, our car is quiet, what is it? A 1,2 tonne vehicle delivering a couple of kilos of food and drink. So for us we want to be delivering in the most efficient way from an environmental perspective and also from a, from a transport perspective because obviously an E bike or a robotic vehicle will give you more efficiency in regards to where it can travel and not get caught up with traffic like a car could. So, so I've got no doubt the dominoes, whether it be in a robotic space or a E bike space or other forms of delivery method, we'll continue to explore and then look at what's right to deploy or what we can deploy in particular regions. Obviously being international business, it gives us a reach beyond Australia. So you know, there's even E scooters in Europe and other methods that we do buy. So watch this space and continue to see us evolve where we can.
[Voiceover]: Brilliant. Now we've talked about the growth that you guys have had and the phenomenal success you've had rolling out new services recently. What's next for Domino's? Where do you go from here?
Michael Gillespie: Yeah, unfortunately I never can really answer this with a lot of clarity because we are a fairly. I thought I'd try by nature in regards to what's next for us and that's only, you know, it's great effort trying and my slip up but hopefully not, I guess, you know, the best way I can answer it is if you look, if you look at our history over the last decade plus in the technology and digital space, you know, we've always had a fairly regular run rate of innovation and the biggest change I've seen in the last few years around our approach to innovation is we're taking some of the digital and digital knowledge, our experiences, our leveraging the data set. We're growing to also enhance our in store experience. And by saying that it might be items that the customers don't necessarily see firsthand, but they're solutions that are providing the customers a greater level of service and quality. So we'll continue for no doubt enhance the front end experience, new features, evolve our ordering solutions that the customers will see that but we'll also be enhancing solutions that we've had stores in the past deliver well less than five minutes and our ovens can be three, four, five minutes. So you know, we're using a Lot of technology back of house now to take our stores to unparalleled levels in the QSR industry to give higher quality and pressure product to our customers faster. So I think if you view I can't go into the particular projects, but continue thinking that Domino's will challenge itself and provide greater levels of efficiency to its stores and its delivery network through technology and also continue the path of delivering customers a more enriching, engaging and unique ordering experience.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. And if I spin it another way as Chief Technology and Digital Officer, and if I've got listeners at home who are looking to upskill or change career paths, what are the skills that you think are going to be really valuable in your team in the coming months or years?
Michael Gillespie: I definitely think, think a understanding of data and how data works is incredibly important in the new world or this new accelerated world where businesses are going to look to transform faster and faster. Because if companies are starting to become more digital savvy or into that space, you really want to understand what data points you're capturing from day one so you can get a richer, more valuable data set to evolve your business rather than, you know, realize that you're two years in the journey and you should have been catching X metric because it could have helped you improve the customer experience or it could have helped improve your operations. So, you know, expose yourself to how read as much as how data's been used by businesses and how you then could apply that to the business you're in or the future career path you're looking at. I also think what I'm seeing is that with this acceleration of digital, what businesses thought were quick in the past is a snail space and what they thought was really quick is now the norm. So listen is to challenge themselves on how do they look at their own approach to delivering projects or supporting projects, coming up with ideas and how do they become more dynamic with that process? You know, does that challenge the current textbooks on how you deliver a project? What, what, what? There'll be so much literature coming out, no doubt in the coming six or 12 months and case studies of how businesses brought projects that were two, three year projects into three to six month projects. Try to learn from that because if they can deliver that improve, they can deliver that. That's going to be a very valuable asset to any business. If you have leaders or digital people that can, that can say, well no, we're not going to do that in three, we're going to do that in three months or six months and succeed with that delivery. And that Takes a big change of mindset because those projects were across whole industry, sometimes taking multiple years. But yeah. So challenge how to be more dynamic in project delivery and really understand the power of data and using that in the right way and probably, yeah, the correct way.
[Voiceover]: I think there's a nice message there for people who might be going through a bit of pain as well, whether in a large or small, large organizations or startups who are, who are really struggling and feel like they're on this, this crazy wheel of just churning out one thing after another and just trying to keep up. Is that everything that you're doing right now, you'll take these and then it'll make you a better practitioner, but also you can take these learnings and improve other businesses in the future as well because it'll just be the new way of working.
Michael Gillespie: Yeah, I think we're in a redesign phase from a deliverables or how we deliver perspective now and there's going to be, yes, hopefully a lot of opportunity for people with digital and technical skills or people who are looking to upskill. There might be people from marketing spaces or finance spaces or anywhere that I'm always a fan of growing richer and more digital and data and IT talent in Australia. And hopefully with this acceleration of digital we'll see more Australian businesses follow paths like DPE and enter international markets and that will only then enhance more learnings and only bring more and more people through on bitbuyce to the Brisbane market, but also the Australian market with great digital and technology that then can be when they find their tier of duty at their respective business over they can go and enrich another business. And it really, you know that that whole data digital mindset and IT area is a place where we can compete on a global scale within Australia. And I really hope that there's a lot of listeners who are seeing opportunities within businesses they thought they'd have to go overseas for now as we accelerate our journey as a country and retailers in our country definitely.
[Voiceover]: Well, you've definitely proved that and Domino's have proved that you don't have to be overseas to be making a mark on the worldwide stage and that the continual growth is there for organizations who've moved with the times with their customers and react accordingly. So thank you so much for sharing everything that you have today. Really appreciate it. Great example for everyone who's an aspiring e commerce retailer or on their past. So thank you again again, Michael. Look forward to see what's coming, especially those robots landing on our doorstep and hopefully speak again soon.
Michael Gillespie: No problem, Nathan. Thank you for having me. And thanks to your listeners for tuning in.
[Voiceover]: Did you catch that term that Michael used in there? Democratizing data? I thought it was brilliant. Rather than getting hung up on hiring teams of data boffins, Domino's make sure that all their teams can access the data that they need. That way the power of the data is held by all and the boffins that really need to deep dive into things that are really important don't answer Service Desk Tickets for Can I Please have this Report? There's a really great activity here for us to map different teams and stakeholders within our businesses to see how we can distribute data between our teams and put the power in more hands rather than just a selected few. I bet there's lots of data that's lying around dormant that can be freed up to your team. Now if that episode has got you really hungry, we will look after you. We have a Domino's voucher for two pizzas, garlic bread and drink delivered hopefully by robots or drones to give away. Simply leave us a review on itunes. Send us a screenshot of your review to hellodtacart.com the review that gives us the wonkiest smile will win pizza.
