Is It Smart to Send Away Customers?

Trish and I tried to check into a LaQuinta motel about 1 p.m. yesterday afternoon.

"Sorry, check-in time is 3 o'clock," I was informed by the desk clerk.

I wasn't surprised, but decided to ask some questions just for fun. "Do you have any clean rooms?" I asked.

"Yes," she admitted.

"But I can't have one of them now?" I asked, already knowing the answer she would give.

"No," she said simply.

"Why not?" I persisted.

"Because the computer won't let me rent any rooms until 3 o'clock," she answered, as if that were a reasonable response.

"Aren't computers wonderful?" I laughed. She kinda laughed with me, but I could tell that she didn't get the joke. So I continued, "Doesn't it strike you as strange that you have a customer standing here wanting to rent a room for the night and you have rooms available, but your computer won't let you rent them for two more hours?"

Clearly, however, she saw nothing strange at all about the situation. Her mind has become so conditioned to the company way of doing things that she had no ability to even consider the possibility that there might be a better way of doing business.

I didn't get upset with the desk clerk because I understood that she was just doing her job and following LaQuinta's policies. However, this does tell me that there are people in LaQuinta's management who are "process" people, more concerned with following the process than with getting the desired result -- paying customers occupying hotel rooms. I don't mean to pick on LaQuinta -- it is a good chain and, overall, I have been very satisfied with staying in their hotels. Other hotel chains probably follow the same check-in policies.

However, it cannot be smart business tactics to send away customers because your system isn't flexible enough to accommodate them. Perhaps LaQuinta is a microcosm for one of the things wrong with our economy. Where are the "inventors" in today's business world? Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and lots of other bright minds in the business world a century ago were constantly looking for problems and searching creatively for ways to solve them. Doing it better was always a top priority for them. Retailing giant J. C. Penney is credited with coining the slogan, "The customer is always right." All too often today, it is the system that is always thought to be right and customers have to accommodate the system.

In our case, LaQuinta's short-sighted check-in policy didn't hurt them. Trish and I had other things to do, so we took care of those things and returned to check in at 3 p.m. However, there were numerous other hotels and motels in the vicinity of the LaQuinta where we stayed. I would guess that more often than not, when the LaQuinta desk clerk sends away customers because it isn't check-in time, they would simply go across the street and check in somewhere else where they had a more customer-friendly policy of renting clean rooms whenever they had a customer wanting to rent them. I suspect that J. C. Penney would not have given LaQuinta a second chance to show top priority to customers over process.