As some of you are aware, I experienced the wait of all waits at Papa Murphy’s recently. Over one hour for a phone order, which left me fuming (partly at my own politeness for not having said something sooner). Anyway, I informed Papa Murphy’s of my story and got a nice result.

The response came from the owner of the Papa Murphy’s franchise, Larry Luttrell. Not only was he incredibly polite and apologetic, he was also genuinely concerned at the debacle that happened. From Larry:

Our goal is to provide "door-to-door" visits in less than 6 minutes. We often even time our stores to make sure this happens. So you can see why an hour plus visit concerns me. I am outraged by this happening and will take whatever steps necessary to improve our operations. Chances are, that we might not have had anyone over 20 working at the store. 95%
of our employees are under 20, but that doesn't change my expectations of those people.

I would love to mail you some free pizza cards, to encourage you to give us another chance, and hopefully win back your business. Hopefully, this was not your last visit, but if it was, I'd like to refund your money, as you definitely did not get what you paid for.

And in a follow-up email:

My regret is that I lost other customers that same night, most of whom, I'll never have the chance to win back.

We really do strive for perfection. I will personally be spending time with our relatively new manager at that store. On a different note, I will be installing an additional POS unit in that store this summer, which should help with our "speed of service" issues. Although I cannot guarantee a six-minute service time each and every Friday night, I feel pretty safe telling you you'll never again wait an hour. If I cannot make that happen, I truly deserve any "bad press" I get.

So, what happened? Well, I received my free pizza cards in the mail and placed the order. Then, I arrived at the store 15 minutes later, which was once again as busy as it had been before. This time, however, the phone orders line was much, much shorter than the walk-in orders line. "Ah-ha" I thought, "this looks promising."

A very polite member of staff took my name, grabbed my freshly-made pizzas from the shelf and I paid with my two free coupons. I was in and out in 3 minutes and 48 seconds (yes, I timed it).

Rarely do I get this level of response from a company. Usually a complaint is greeted with silence. Sometimes I get a “gee, sorry about that” and nothing is done. This was one of those occasions where a store genuinely wanted to fix the problem, win back customers and revive their reputation. And they did it with style.

So, fair is fair. And that’s why I am writing to let everyone out there know that Papa Murphy’s did good. Very good. And the pizzas were first class; in fact, I’ve never tasted a cheese pizza quite as good as the one I ate last night. Something tells me they’re gunning for pizza chain of the year…again.