Your largest competitor is losing customers.

You need to know exactly why. That failure is your market opportunity.

Not generally. Specifically. What broke, who owned it, what should have happened, and what your operation needs to change, fix, or build to win those customers before someone else does.

This brief is built from inside the failure, not from above it. That is the difference between intelligence you can act on and a report you file away.

As a mid-sized company, you use this when:

Your competitor is losing customers and you want to capture them.
Their complaint patterns are recurring. You want to build what they won't.
Their escalations go nowhere. That dead end is your opening.
Their customers are saying one thing. Their process is delivering something else. That gap is yours.

See How It Works ➝

THE PROBLEM

Large companies win customers on name recognition. People choose them because they are familiar, their parents know them, or their employer uses them.

They lose those customers when the process fails. When the customer becomes a case number. When three departments give three different answers and nothing gets put in writing. When the institution's process runs perfectly for the institution and the customer absorbs every cost.

That is when familiar becomes untrustworthy.

And that is the moment a mid-sized company has an opening that money cannot buy. You can know their name, understand their situation, and build a process that actually serves them instead of protecting itself.

You already know your largest competitors have customer trust problems. What you do not have is a documented, specific, decision-ready map of exactly where those failures are occurring, what they are costing those customers, and what you need to do differently to win them.

The large company knows its logo. You can know your customer. That is what this brief builds for you.

THE METHOD

To win the customers your largest competitor is losing, you need to know exactly why they are leaving. Not generally. Specifically. What broke, who owned it, what should have happened, and what your operation needs to build to become the better choice.

Every brief maps that chain completely. Nothing is inferred. Every element is explicitly identified and traced directly to a documented event.

The intelligence in each brief is sourced from inside the process. That means real consumer experiences documented at the transaction level, not aggregated from complaint filings or inferred from public data. The sourcing method depends on the engagement. The analytical standard does not change.

Trigger: The specific moment the customer's trust broke. Anchored to a real interaction, not a general complaint pattern.

Process Owner: The department, role, or system that held responsibility at each point. Ownership tied to function, not assumption. This is where your competitor's design shows its cracks.

Required Action: What each process owner was supposed to do. Stated as clear, verifiable actions. This is the standard your competitor failed to meet.

Execution Reality: What actually happened. Documented actions, not interpretations. This is the gap your competitor created.

Accountability Gaps: Where ownership disappeared and required actions were not taken. This is where your competitor lost the customer and does not know it yet.

Customer Risk: Where the breakdown created churn, legal exposure, reputational damage, or regulatory attention. What that customer is now carrying and why they are looking for someone better.

Competitive Translation: What your operation needs to have in place to win that customer. Specific. Actionable. Ready for your leadership team to act on immediately.

THE OFFER

Start with the Institutional Customer Friction Brief

The public Institutional Customer Friction Brief is free. It is the proof of the method. It shows how one real institutional failure is mapped from trigger to process owner, required action, execution reality, accountability gap, customer risk, and competitive implication.

The example is banking, but the method is not limited to banking. The same failure pattern appears anywhere customers get trapped between departments, receive conflicting answers, hit escalation dead ends, or carry the cost of a process that technically “worked” for the company.

Use it to see the level of specificity before you request a paid engagement.

Option 1: Sector Failure Mirror Session
$3,500 flat fee. One-time session.

A 60–90 minute private working session built around a documented institutional customer-friction pattern in your sector.

This is the fastest way to pressure-test whether a known failure pattern in your market may also exist within your company, your competitor’s process, or a specific customer journey.

We walk through what broke, where ownership disappeared, what the customer experienced, which elements were unavoidable constraints versus preventable process-design choices, and what your team should examine first.

Best for teams examining patterns such as mortgage servicing failure, credit card payoff confusion, bot containment, complaint closure without resolution, account lockout, fraud freeze, escalation dead ends, digital servicing contradictions, or branch-to-call-center handoff failure.

Includes a one-page Sector Failure Mirror Test Summary delivered within 7 business days after the session.

This is not a custom investigation or internal audit. It is a low-risk first engagement for teams that want to understand and pressure-test a documented failure pattern before commissioning deeper work.

Option 2: Custom Competitor / Ethnographic Institutional Customer Friction Brief
Starting at $15,000. Scoped engagement.

For teams that want fresh intelligence on a specific competitor, customer journey, failure pattern, or customer segment.

You name the market question. I assess whether it can be documented cleanly, then produce a decision-ready Custom Competitor / Ethnographic Institutional Customer Friction Brief showing where customers are getting trapped, where ownership disappears, what the customer experiences, and what the failure reveals about churn, complaint risk, trust erosion, regulatory exposure, or competitive opportunity.

This work is external-facing. It may include competitor analysis, customer journey reconstruction, document review, complaint and friction-pattern analysis, sourced customer records, or ethnographic process documentation from the customer’s point of view.

Because access to competitor and customer journey varies, this engagement is scoped after intake. If the requested competitor, journey, or failure pattern cannot be documented cleanly, I recommend the closest viable failure pattern, customer segment, or process angle.

Typical delivery is 4 to 8 weeks, depending on sourcing, access, documentation requirements, and complexity.

Option 3: Internal Ethnographic Institutional Customer Friction Mirror Brief
Starting at $15,000. Scoped engagement.

For companies that want to know whether their own process could create the same kind of customer harm documented in a known failure pattern.

This work is internal-facing. I map your customer-facing process from the customer’s point of view and identify where customers may be trapped, misrouted, denied clear ownership, refused written answers, given conflicting guidance, or pushed into avoidable escalation.

This is especially useful for processes involving servicing, disputes, account access, fraud review, complaint handling, escalation, estate handling, billing, cancellation, digital support, branch-to-call-center handoffs, or customer documentation.

You receive a private, decision-ready Internal Ethnographic Institutional Customer Friction Mirror Brief showing where your process is exposed, what the customer experiences at each friction point, where ownership breaks down, and what needs to change before the issue becomes visible through complaints, churn, legal exposure, regulatory attention, or public distrust.

Typical delivery is 4 to 8 weeks, depending on access, documentation, stakeholder availability, and process complexity.

Option 4: Monthly Intelligence Retainer
$15,000 per month. Three-month minimum.

Ongoing customer-friction intelligence for teams that need more than a one-time brief.

Retainer work may include recurring Institutional Customer Friction Briefs, policy drift detection, complaint and friction-pattern tracking, new case monitoring, executive updates, market-risk monitoring, customer journey intelligence, and follow-up analysis as new patterns emerge.

Scope is defined at the start of the engagement and adjusted around the highest-value intelligence needs each month.

This is the ongoing outside analytical function for teams that do not want customer trust failures to remain invisible, go stale, invisible, or unexamined.

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WHAT'S NEXT

The sample Institutional Customer Friction Brief is real. It is not a description of the methodology. It is the methodology, applied to a documented institutional failure and delivered as decision-ready intelligence.

If that is the level of intelligence your team needs, start here.

No form. No gate. The Institutional Customer Friction Brief is the proof.

View Sample Brief

Built for mid-sized companies ready to win the customers their larger competitors are losing.