Managers leading change through planning and prioritization

Email to Location Managers

Congratulations and thank you for all of your hard work! We understand that as our stores become busier, your work burden has increased. Some of you have been working longer hours and we appreciate all you do. After much deliberation we have come upon what we believe to be an ideal solution to managing the increase in customer orders and improving the overall customer service experience. We are pleased to announce the adoption of a new technology tool that will allow customers to place their orders at in-store kiosks. Their doing so will ensure that their orders are accurate, and will also alleviate the burden placed on personnel.

The role of technology in customer relations management is to establish new relationships, and also to “develop loyalty and retention among existing customers,” (Viljoen, Bennett, Berndt, et al, 2005, p. 106). New technology will radically transform the ways customers experience our stores, and the ways you interact with customers, too. I understand many of you will have questions and concerns, so feel free to email me. We will also have several meetings for all store managers as we implement this important technological and process change to our company. Of course, there will be a full training session too.

This email is just the first step, as we want to keep all of you informed about the changes taking place. We look forward to seeing you all at our first informational meeting next Tuesday.

Analysis

Email is an effective channel to send this message because it is informal and non-threatening. We are simply alerting the store managers of our intent to adopt the new technology and are not offering any rules or regulations that would require a more formal process of communication. The pitfalls of using informal methods of communication include needing to follow through with more formal statements. We also need to take care that our communication is not misunderstood. Careful wording of the email should help initiate the change model introduced by Kotter Inc (2018), which begins with creating a sense of urgency. The email creates a sense of urgency without inducing panic, by alerting the store managers that they will need help with the recent surge in customer orders.

The second step in the change model is to form a coalition. We mention the meetings with managers in the email, which constitute the creation of a coalition of like-minded and solution-driven managers (“Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model,” ‘n.d.). Through these meetings we can elicit an emotional connection to the change, which will help when adapting the new technology.

Third, we will unfold our vision for change. The vision will be specific and will include target goals for new orders and accuracy rates for customer orders. Fourth, we will continually communicate the vision in our meetings as we unveil the new technology and teach it in formal training sessions. The training sessions will also enable our company to remove all obstacles to adopting the new technology and the changes that go along with it. Removing obstacles is in fact the fifth step in the Kotter 8-step process. During the implementation stage, we will reward stores with good performance and technology adaptation.