Background

During the VWO ConvEx’25 interviews, Chris Gibbins, Chief Experimentation Officer at CCX, sat down with Fabian Alvares, Global Head of CRO at Pizza Hut, to discuss Pizza Hut’s experimentation journey and the role problem-first thinking plays in scaling impact across a global, operationally complex business.

Pizza Hut operates across 110 markets globally, serving customers through a complex mix of owned markets, franchises, and third-party delivery partners.

Experimentation is central to how the brand optimises digital performance across web, ordering, and personalisation, while supporting very different operational and cultural contexts worldwide.

Creative CX has partnered with Pizza Hut for over two years, supporting experimentation across multiple global regions.

The Opportunity

Unlike traditional ecommerce, experimentation at Pizza Hut must account for operational constraints across restaurants, stock availability, and delivery networks. Digital changes can have real-world consequences if demand shifts unexpectedly.

In addition, customer behaviour varies significantly by market, requiring a deeper understanding of cultural nuance, language, and promotional sensitivity. Pizza Hut needed an experimentation approach that went beyond page-level optimisation to focus on real customer problems across the entire end-to-end journey.

The Approach

Creative CX supported Pizza Hut with problem-first experimentation, grounded in Opportunity Discovery Research. This included moderated usability testing and quant & qual data analysis, designed to uncover genuine barriers and opportunities across the full customer lifecycle, from ordering through delivery and consumption.

Research participants were professionally recruited from Pizza Hut’s target audience and completed real orders, allowing insights to extend beyond the website into fulfilment and post-delivery experience.

Creative CX also facilitated problem-first experimentation days, bringing together cross-functional teams and senior stakeholders to prioritise problems, co-create ideas, and embed experimentation culture across the business. Both internal and external sessions were used to encourage fresh thinking and reduce bias.

The Impact

This approach uncovered critical insights across the customer journey, including points of confusion around third-party delivery fulfilment and unmet customer expectations.

By grounding experimentation in real customer problems and real operational realities, Pizza Hut has been able to run more meaningful tests with greater commercial impact.

Experimentation is now seen as a shared responsibility across teams, reinforcing a strong culture of learning and ensuring digital optimisation supports both customer experience and operational success at a global scale.