Eliza Diaz's Sunday ritual includes a trip to the salon and box of pizza. For as long as the 24 year old contact center manager can remember, Sundays have always been pizza night for her family, and they usually use a pizza chain's 24 hour delivery service to order their favorite weekend treat.

"We call so regularly, that we know some of the operators by name and voice already. Although there are times when some of our orders are taken down incorrectly, most of the time we are satisfied by the level of service they provide," she said.

But the telephone's role as the main service portal for food and other deliveries is increasingly coming under fire from the Internet. In the United States, food chains and similar industries have long added online delivery systems to better reach customers, and even in the Philippines, the phenomenon is slowly taking hold.

Already, local companies are starting to roll out new online delivery platforms wherein users can log in and order their favorite food and have it delivered right to their doorstep. But unlike traditional over the phone delivery, this new system is more user oriented, making use of ordering forms to fully automate orders and take out the factor of human error.

Local website Spot.ph recently ran an interesting article on the relative merits of ordering food online , by comparing the different online platforms that food chains use. What they found was the online delivery platforms in the Philippines are still in its their early stages, and thus are not as advanced as those in Western countries. However, the article also states that most of them are passable enough, and deliver the goods as promised.

When told of this new online delivery system, Diaz said she was surprised that even her favorite pizza chain, which operates one of the online portals, neglected to mention that they had such a thing. Pressed whether she would want to start ordering online, she perfectly underlined the challenges these new services must hurdle in order to gain broader recognition.

"Firstly, it's a scary thing for me, because I want someone to talk to instead of a machine.Second, I think they are doing a poor job of promoting the merits of this kind of service, and I have yet to see any advantages they have over the phone system. Lastly, I know that companies outsource their ordering systems to contact centers, and I don't want people to lose their jobs to a computer," she said.