Long experience has taught me that the crux of my fortunes is whether I can radiate good will toward my audience. There is only one way to do it and that is to feel it. You can fool the eyes and minds of the audience, but you cannot fool their hearts.

Howard Thurston
Magician

‘Do you want to know the biggest leverage point for improving the quality of your customers’ experience?’

I was having an initial meeting with the general manager of a luxury hotel, and the subject of TripAdvisor ratings had come up. The site's user-generated reviews have a big influence on the hospitality industry, and one of his objectives was to get the hotel into the top 10 for his city. He told me about the obstacles he was up against: high turnover among millennials, increasingly demanding customers, changes in buying habits driven by new technology. He talked about the results he wanted to achieve: a stronger brand, higher engagement and productivity, attracting, retaining and developing the best talent. When I asked him my question, he looked slightly amused and invited me to tell him. ‘The biggest leverage point for improving the quality of your customers’ experience is the quality of the experience you and your team are having'. He looked shocked, and said he agreed. He told me that he passionately believed this, but that I was one of the only people he'd ever met who held the same view. I asked him what he'd tried, and he told me about a variety of efforts to build a stronger, happier team. Some had worked well, while others had not. Some people had been impacted, while others were unaffected. I said I understood, and asked, ‘Do you want to know the single biggest influence on the quality of you and your team's experience?’ He did.

Your understanding of how your experience is created is the ultimate leverage point for improving the quality of that experience.

The more deeply you understand the principles behind clarity, the more you benefit from your mind's ability to self-correct to resilience, creativity and connection.

Whether you call it the ‘connection economy’, the ‘transformation economy’ or the ‘experience economy’, clients and customers want results. Expectations are increasing – high-quality products and services are the minimum requirement, and people want them now. So how do you create the kind of transformational experiences that lead to great reviews, valuable referrals and raving fans? It turns out that the most powerful leverage point for impactful customer experiences is inside the mind of the customer. The only place value can ever be created is in the mind of the audience. Value is in the mind of the beholder, and is an emergent property of the relationship. And where all the elements of value come together is in the customer experience.

The fish rots from the head down

Remember the Harvard Business Review article showing that leaders' states of mind are ‘transmitted’ to other people? This is not a new observation; an ancient proverb captures the infectious nature of contaminated thinking in the phrase, ‘the fish rots from the head down’. But it turns out that the same infectious quality is true of the calm, happy, energized states that drive high performance, connection and positive experiences. Companies that are renowned for the quality of their customers' experiences (e.g. Apple, Google, Southwest Airlines, Zappos) recognize the fact that it's correlated to their employees' experiences.

Leading management and business thinker Peter Drucker famously remarked that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. So what exactly is the culture of a company, a community or a society?

Culture is the expression of a group's level of consciousness; their collective clarity of understanding.

And the thoughts, words, actions and artefacts that make sense from that level of understanding.

While there will be various expressions of that level of understanding (e.g. stories, rituals, values, procedures, habits of thinking, beliefs, organization charts, metrics, rules, awards, celebrations), the thing that drives them is the level of consciousness behind them. As an organization's collective clarity of understanding increases, things that used to be normal stop making sense, and things that used to seem impossible are suddenly sensible and straightforward.

The day-to-day expression of a group's level of understanding determines the collective state of mind it operates from. This affects numerous important factors, all of which correlate to the deep drivers we've been exploring, including…

• Clarity of purpose, direction and communication to stakeholders (e.g. TED's purpose – to spread ideas – is known by millions of people, and reflects a clarity of direction and communication that has transformed the organization).
• How resilient and agile the employees and organization are in their ability to respond (e.g. Apple teams sometimes look more like a startup than part of a billion-dollar company, working independently on key projects).
• How willing to experiment, risk failing and celebrate the insights gained in the process (e.g. Google regularly gives awards for the biggest failed experiment that yielded the biggest insight).
• How creative the organization is in solving problems and innovating (e.g. design firm IDEO are using their OpenIDEO platform to leverage a large global community, crowdsourcing solutions to some of the world's biggest challenges).
• The sense of genuine connection to each other, and to the community they serve (e.g. digital media company, Gimlet Media, transparently showcases its culture and builds connection with its audience through the podcasts it creates).
• The ‘feel’ of the brand, and the feeling state experienced by employees and customers alike (e.g. every brand you've ever had an experience of, and every company you've ever interacted with… for better or worse).

Here's a simple way of thinking about it…

Contamination days: you know those days when it probably would have been better if you'd stayed under the duvet… Where nothing seems to turn out right, and it's almost as if you're working against yourself… And it's stressful and unproductive… And everything seems like a struggle and a chore… And you finish the day wondering where it went, with nothing to show for it but a headache and more on your to-do list.

Clarity days: and then there are those other days when you can't seem to put a foot wrong, and everything's falling into place… Those days when it's almost as if you're being guided, and you're unusually productive… Feeling at ease, yet focused… Coming up with great ideas, and finding solutions easily… And you finish the day with a sense of accomplishment, feeling fulfilled and satisfied with a job well done.

The kind of day a person is having determines whether they're showing up as a plus or a minus in their organization. And while most of us have both of these kinds of days from time to time, their frequency and duration is a function of your clarity of understanding. As you get a deeper understanding of the principles behind clarity, you'll find yourself having fewer ‘contamination days’ and more ‘clarity days’. Perhaps best of all, the self-correcting nature of the mind means that even if you start out having a bad day, it can turn into a clarity day in a heartbeat, because…

The thing that transforms your experience from contamination to clarity is a realization… an insight… a fresh new thought.

And you're wired for insight, because you're built for reality… Optimized for success, with the factory settings for creating results.

The deeper your understanding of the principles behind clarity, the more easily you'll find yourself defaulting to the factory settings.

How to turn a one-star circumstance into a five-star experience

So what's going to have the biggest influence on the ‘glasses’ your customers are wearing? The ‘glasses’ you and your employees are wearing. Moods are infectious, but clarity of understanding is a powerful inoculator. As you deepen your understanding of the inside-out nature of life, you'll be less likely to ‘catch’ the negative moods of your colleagues and customers, and be more capable of leading them in a positive direction. And here's the thing: mistakes may still happen from time to time, but your ability to respond from a place of resilience, connection and clarity is the thing most likely to turn a situation around, and put a smile on a customer's face. That's how you turn a one-star circumstance into a five-star experience.

So now that you know the key to transformational experiences, how do you prosper in the transformation economy?