Your customer’s experience is almost entirely determined by their interaction with your people. Until you get that right, your space doesn’t matter, your technology doesn’t matter, nothing else really matters.

Those are the thoughts I had while reading the Customer of the Future by Blake Morgan. It was written a few years ago, but still has good lessons for business leaders today.

When Morgan started writing this book, it was going to be about customer experience technology. But the more she dug into the topic, the more she found that technology was far behind something else in creating incredible customer experiences: mindset.

That’s the top of my three takeaways from this book. That the attitude of those who interact with the customers must be customer-focused, not product-focused. Technology tends to skew focus toward product. But technologies come and go. Great customer experiences require a great culture, which comes about through leadership based upon a clear organizational purpose.

In an interview, The Experience Economy authors Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore told me that great customer experiences start with the mindset. It starts by shifting from a service-delivery mindset to an experience-staging mindset. To make that leap, employees must realize that, when they are interacting with customers, they are on stage.

Pine and Gilmore told me that the employee-customer interaction accounts for about 85% of the experience. Technology, physical space, and everything else make up the other 15%.

My second takeaway from the book is that your customer experience is the end result of a series of intentional decisions you make as a company. Those decisions impact customer perception of your experience and your brand. I call that, “How You Do What You Do.” What you do can’t create an experience that differentiates you. Your customers have too many other options that provide the what. No, it’s how you do what you do that creates the experience.

And my third takeaway is the important role that technology plays in creating a great employee experience, without which you can’t have a consistently great customer experience. As Morgan points out very effectively in this book, employers have allowed subpar or absent technologies to waste employee time – almost an hour every day – which steals their time and their focus away from the customer.

If you want to create a great customer experience, start with mindset, be intentional about your decisions and keep the employee experience at the forefront of your IT decisions. To find out how, read The Customer of the Future today.