A Positive Reputation for the Price of an Appetizer? Firebirds Gets It!

I’ve never had a bad dining experience at the Firebirds restaurant in North Hills, Raleigh.

That’s a lie.

I’ve never left Firebirds thinking I’ve had a bad dining experience.

You see, the restaurant has a sixth sense when it comes to unhappy customers. In fact, the management is so good at spotting situations that can lead to unhappy customers, they often fix them, before you even know you’re unhappy!

Take last night. We arrived at a very quiet time for an early dinner. At 4:45pm, you don’t expect to have to do much waiting. Unfortunately, it took a lot longer than usual for our food to make it’s way out of the kitchen. We weren’t really annoyed, just really hungry. We also didn’t really complain. The service is usually so good, so we just put it down to an isolated incident. The only thing we said to our server, was that we thought perhaps our order had gotten lost.

We thought nothing more of it.

Bam! Within a few minutes, one of the managers came to our table and apologized for our wait. He explained that the delay had been because they wanted to make sure all the ingredients in our salad were fresh, which took a little longer to find and prepare.

That explanation was all we needed.

Then, he said he had made an adjustment to our bill, as an apology. That later turned out to be $7.

The result. My wife and I were once again impressed and here I am writing this post.

What can you learn from this?

Make sure all of your staff are trained to look for even the smallest hint that a customer may be unhappy. Then, do something proactive about it and turn what could be a 1-star Yelp review into a glowing blog post!

It cost Firebirds just $7–for a review, a link, and the repeat business of a regular customer. I’d say that’s a great ROI!