One of the advantages of being an international Change Management Consultant is that you see many different types of organisations in all shapes and sizes. Some operate in mature markets and are often quite desperate to retain market share. Others see the world as their oyster and look to take on the 'giants' by having innovative technology, new ideas or better products. The common denominator for all these businesses is customer service. Customer service boils down to three steps:

1. Attracting customers to your product or service through 'above the line' advertising, recommendation or incentive and thereby creating a 'propensity to purchase'.
2. Winning customers through whatever 'sales vehicle' is most effective for your business, utilising 'below the line' promotional expenditure, and building a 'value for money' framework.
3. Retaining customers by achieving product and service satisfaction to the point that 'competitor offerings' are considered to be less 'value for money'.

Conventional models of customer service rely on providing products and services at the 'right' price through an effective sales relationship, that have demonstrable features that fulfill expectations and, consequently, build long-term trust and thereby repeat purchase.

The FIN

For all of us, life is a process of learning. We choose either to learn from and resolve experiences or create defence mechanisms, which may cause us to react to events in an inappropriate, incongruent manner. Customer service is better expressed as a learning relationship, where if the lessons are not learnt quickly there is a severing of the customer connection. A new model of change, that reflects more fully the dynamics of this exchange, is called the Motivational Driver Model or FIN (looks like a shark's fin). This model was originally developed to look at the dynamics of change, but has since been put to good use in the improved understanding of human relationships.

It has as its foundation a view that human interaction can be considered as two journeys:

• An inner journey, which takes on life experience, resulting in feelings, which we try and understand, that may lead to belief sets (may be mistaken).
• From these deep 'mind sets' we form strategies, which create emotions that drive our interaction with the world as part of an outer journey.

A yet greater understanding may be achieved by considering these dimensions as a hierarchy of needs that extends beyond the work of Maslow.

Another way of looking at this hierarchy is that the 'Mental -Physical' represents the masculine quality and the 'Spiritual - Emotional' represents the feminine. These should be regarded as qualities rather than physiology with the objective of finding balance or harmony. The concept of balance is thousands of years old and has its roots in the concept of Ying and Yang as symbolised by the now famous circle bisected by the Sigmoid curve of Charles Handy. Yet further discoveries about these ancient truths can be made by placing the pyramid on its side to create the FIN.

The FIN demonstrates the amplification of values and beliefs, creating thoughts, which drive emotions and so determine actions and visa versa.

Bringing this somewhat esoteric thinking to the world of commerce, it can be seen that these dimensions could be regarded as 'Engines for Change' which must be fuelled or empowered.

This FIN Model shows in a simple, but powerful way that values drive thoughts, which invoke feelings leading to actions and behaviours of customers. It also demonstrates the amplification effect whereby a small input at the Values stage can have a dramatic impact on how people make buying decisions. It is a fairly straightforward step is to see how above-the-line advertising exposes the customer to physical (visual), emotional (feelings), mental (technical specification) and spiritual (values and beliefs) dimensions to achieve a 'propensity to purchase'.

Effective advertising takes the potential customer through all these levels of perception to create a 'propensity to purchase'.

When this 'propensity to purchase' has been created, the potential customer must then engage with some form of 'selling vehicle', be it shop, telephone, catalogue, television (home shopping) or personal computer (Internet). Here the propensity to purchase is translated, through below-the-line investment in the selling resource, to purchase and achieving the sale. The customer must be activated in all the elements of the buying chain by being satisfied that the product technically meets their needs (mental), the relationship with the sales person is good and inspires confidence (emotional) and the performance of the product meets expectations (physical).