Pizza Hut México cut turnover by 20 points in 4 months: what they hadn't moved in 2 years

Pizza Hut México (Food Delivery Brands) runs over 300 restaurants nationwide, in an industry that turns over 135-140% a year. Every exit takes a heavy investment in recruiting and training with it, and keeping frontline talent is the challenge that holds up the experience in every store.

Like the whole industry, Pizza Hut made retention decisions with traditional exit surveys. In high-turnover businesses almost nobody fills out an exit survey on the way out: fewer than 15% answered. On that tiny sample, boxed into 6 generic reasons and consolidated by hand in spreadsheets, they built broad plans that often moved nothing. Ricardo Galicia calls it survivorship bias: listening only to the ones who come back to say goodbye.

In 2 years Pizza Hut had raised wages above market, improved its value proposition and taken engagement to record highs. Turnover stayed the same. The missing piece was the question nobody could answer with data: why, exactly, do people leave.

They were one of the first customers to bet on Emi's Diagnostic Agent, and they co-created it: they gave feedback and saw it land in the tool.

The difference wasn't a prettier exit survey: it was changing the channel. People don't fill out forms, but they do answer a WhatsApp message. When someone leaves, Emi opens a conversation, and the response rate went from 15% to 40%. What they say is classified into 20 real reasons, roll-up-able by store, zone and region, and each reason yields a rehire NPS: how many of those who left would come back, and why.

The diagnostic insight: training was not the most frequent reason for leaving, but it was the one doing the most damage to recommendation and tenure. With that reading they ran two rounds of action with initiatives of their own, such as Liderazgo Consciente, Hutflix and Vibramos Hut. The rehire NPS for the training reason went from −40 to +20 in 4 months, and training dropped from first place in the ranking of reasons to fourth.

Turnover fell 20 percentage points in 4 months versus the same period the year before: what they hadn't achieved in 2 years. 56% of leavers said they would return; within 4 months, 63-64%. Staffing coverage, which had already gone from 93% to 97% with Emi's hiring product, reached 99.8%, the best in their history.

Ricardo Galicia's advice to himself 2 years ago: "First: I should have done it sooner."