By Richard M. Sherwin

The team that works for our sister company, GCM LLC, has done strategic research for several CE, PC, Mobile product manufacturers, regional retailers and national service providers. We usually get t

hese projects after a calamity like Verizon’s huge DSL snafu that lasted almost four years, Zoran’s sudden loss of chip business or Panasonic’s branding mistakes a few years back. This research also included small companies like GPS maker Tom-Tom or large retailers we are not allowed to mention.

Our advice comes from readers and viewers like you. Most of the time these companies take heed and never make the same mistake again.

Recently two of these companies, Tom-Tom and Verizon bit themselves in the behind with technical malfunctions and marketing blunders that leave us wondering who is running the store at those two usually reliable companies.

Tom-Tom, which has nearly 70% of the add-on car GPS business, experienced a glitch back in February during the leap year transition that effected its satellite systems in North America. Thousands of Tom-Toms have been miss-communicating or not communicating properly with the satellites in North America. Slow to react, it took the Dutch company months to get customers to download the patch and then do a not so easy upgrade to nearly all of the Tom-Tom models produced in the last five years. The issue was compounded by not sending out alerts to customers in their extensive database. For those who got the notice or realized that their Tom-Toms were turning on and off without notice or not directing them to the right address, there was the added burden that you had to reset the units outside your home and no way to actually know whether the reset or the fixes were working.

What’s compounded the issue is that Tom-Tom recently switched to an offshore tech support that’s completely overloaded even though they do know how to make the patch work. It also comes at a time that most mobile phone makers use a pretty decent navigation system from Google (free) and low cost or no cost GPS inside their smart phones from Verizon , AT@T and Sprint.

And as of this article, even if you go to the Tom-Tom website, the so-called smartest and most reliable GPS maker still makes it a terrible experience to get your GPS fixed or upgraded. So in effect, 1000s of customers still don’t have a reliable GPS that they paid good money for.

Verizon Bends Then Offends

Back in December of 2011, Verizon tacked on a $2 fee for one-time payments made by phone and online. The country’s biggest wireless company also admitted to having technical problems with its new 4G wireless network.

Shortly after this PR and consumer debacle ended where Verizon rescinded its fee, most industry wags predicted the nation’s top wireless and phone company would get those consumer back one way or another. But this week the company added a $30 upgrade charge to customers going from any phone to a smart phone….even if they qualified for a discount by being a good customer for a few years. This error in judgment was compounded by the fact that its much touted 4G high speed wireless system was barely reaching 3G in many communities because of, ironically, too many customers.

But wait there’s more bad news for Verizon. Its highly regarded and supposedly integrated VZ Wireless, FIOS and DSL websites are, once again, a jumble of too many required passwords, inaccurate product and pricing information and offshore online support that doesn’t seem to be trained to fix anything.

And finally Verizon’s long developed Home Control System, which mirrors an IBM failure of ten years ago, is not working out well. The product, which promised home control and monitoring of your home locks, security cameras, heating and lighting systems at a fraction of the cost of professionally installed systems, just plain doesn’t work. From networking issues to flaws in the actual security codes to not turning on or off, Home Control has been a bust. So it is going to cost the company lots of money to fix and even more customers will lose their faith in this product that inside sources say was never tested well enough with real customers before its launch.

So here’s my prediction for both Tom-Tom and Verizon: when the newest consumer ratings come out by the various analytical groups, Tom-Tom and Verizon will drop more than a few places in the top company charts.