The Tribune

By D’Arcy Rahming

I once had a client who was dependent on customer service representatives to push a particular marketing promotion they were doing. It was simple enough. All they had to do was to ask each customer for their e-mail address. These addresses would later be used to follow up on clients and see how they enjoyed the service. However, the report coming back from management was that my promotion did not work because no one was willing to give up their e-mail address.

So I observed the customer service department for a while and discovered what was really going on. The customer service representatives viewed asking for the e-mail address as a change from their daily routine, so they saw no reason to ask. One potential solution was that the customer service representative needed to be incentivised to make a change in his or her behaviour.

For the purpose of this article, I want to talk about how hard change is for most people, and what can make them change. First, I want to share another story with you about the effect of change on people. When I was with a large multinational firm in the US, I was fortunate to be brought in as a technical consultant because the existing management staff was too terrified to make decisions.

They had just been through a change in the structure of their organisation, and many people had been ‘retired’. This company had an excellent training programme, so they arranged courses in change management to help people cope. It was there that I discovered that the basis of change management is grief counselling. Because change to many people is the equivalent of having to face their own death. There are five stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

It was amazing to me because these folks, who were middle managers, were all going through this grief process, and the biggest complaint back then was e-mail. The job of management had previously been to control the information flow between the executives and the functional workers. Now, the managers would have to become more technical or more strategic, as the middle layer was being cut out. People were literally paralysed with fear that the world they had known was crumbling around them.

That is why, as marketers, you will often encounter unreasonable resistance at every level, but especially at implementation. People only change because of severe trauma. This could be positive or negative trauma. Firing someone if they do not exhibit certain behaviours is one way, I suppose. Or you could do what I did to get those e-mails from the customer service representatives. They were given a $5 bonus per e-mail for each new address that tested out. Lo and behold, people were suddenly coming up with e-mails. No surprise there.

• NB: D’Arcy Rahming holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. A lecturer at the College of the Bahamas, Mr Rahming has clients in general insurance, retail, the health and medical fields, sports federations and financial services. He is also treasurer of the Bahamas Olympic Committee. To contact him he can be reached at DArcyRahmingsr@gmail.com.