My superior is leaving the team I have been a part of for 10 months. Over the span of those 10 months he addressed to us several problems with some users by making snarky comments like "We technically shouldn't be doing this" while doing some bad practices that for the sake of privacy I won't disclosure.
Now that my superior is leaving, he told us that he mistakenly thought he was helping them by doing this one or two times out of sympathy, but those bad practices became an habit over the course of years. Now, with him stepping down; my colleague and I(two remaining members of the team, he's been 1 year on the job, I have been 10 months) want to change this, we are aware that these practices should cease to exist and are working with the interim superior(another higher up) to make the according changes.
Now, the users seem to be having a problem with these changes. They get mad at us and think we don't want to help them, the recurrent sentence is "Winnie Pooh(fictional name for former superior) used to do this super quick and without asking so many details". We keep getting compared to him cause apparently, for them, implementing this new policy is us refusing to help them.
Users were notified that some changes were going to happen and mentioned a most if not all of them(at the time being, which were the most important ones) in a memo; so it's not only that we wanted to, we first asked our interim superior who took this matter to the board and after that we got the "You're good to go" talk.
So, now seeing we have a lot of dissatisfied users, we're feeling somewhat down cause of obvious reasons but we don't want to back down from our much needed work plan. So after the long explanation of the situation the question is: How can we convince our users to forget the past days and follow the new policy without so many complaints?
PS: Some comments mention that users were "forced" to cheat our system cause of any reason, I can't go into detail but trust me when I say bad practices were being performed, among several departments of the company.