Do the right thing for them. What can you do to diffuse the anger, hurt, and disappointment. What can you do to better communicate with your customers about the potential benefits of the change for them. Your communication skills, particularly your listening skills, and your ability to maintain a positive attitude will be sorely tested. More than at any other time your colleagues must be able to trust you and feel that you have their best interests at heart.
Leadership often involves making the best of a very difficult, possibly even a bad, situation.
Not long ago Americans became acquainted with General Norman Schwarzkopf who led the successful Allied campaign in the Persian Gulf. John Maxwell writes about how much earlier in his career in Vietnam Schwarzkopf turned around a battalion that was in shambles. That turned out to be an assignment to what Schwarzkopf described as a horrible, malignant place called the Batangan Peninsula. The area had been fought over for thirty years, was covered with mines and booby traps, and was the site of numerous weekly casualties from those devices. Schwarzkopf made the best of a bad situation.