Vic Cassano, president of the Cassano’s Pizza King chain, told Pizza Markteplace.com that he and his franchisees spent a million dollars on their new call center. It paid off: fewer hang-ups, no busy signals, less putting callers on hold, and now agents aren't so frazzled by making pizzas that they can't squeeze in an upsell.

Cincinnati's LaRosa’s Pizza chain has 57 locations. LaRosa EVP of marketing Pete Buscani had an interesting strategy to convince franchise owners to pitch in for a central call center -- playing call recordings from busy nights:

"You’d hear this voice almost screaming, 'Hi! Thanks for calling LaRosa’s! Can you hold, please?'" Buscani recalled. The recordings left franchisees grimacing. "And if there was two minutes of dead air, we let it run until they got back on the phone. ... For about the better part of an hour, they played those conversations, and when it was all said and done, the franchisees said, 'Let’s go.'"

Pizza Marketplace.com reports that although U.S. call centers employ 3.7% of the workforce (a statistic they got from Call Center Magazine), only six brands in the pizza business in this country use call centers. Cassano’s, LaRosa’s, Rusty’s Pizza and Vocelli Pizza are four of them. Domino’s Pizza and Pizza Hut use call centers in select markets.

"Such limited penetration makes sense in some respects. To make a call center an affordable investment, a brand needs significant presence of 10 to 30 stores in a single market to benefit from labor savings and the marketing value of a one-number system. Tens of thousands of pizza companies lack this critical mass, but several dozen larger regional chains have the numbers yet don’t use call centers."

VoIP will make call centers more affordable for pizza chains. Outsourcing is another option.

Experts point out that one-number marketing is great for a pizza chain. Getting people across different communities to inadvertantly memorize one phone number for pizza can have a powerful effect.