In Seth Godin's latest blog he mentions how company's almost always melt, they rarely explode. It is almost always the short-term thinking of today that causes the crisis of tomorrow.
Rarely in the moment, when business is down and your customers are no longer engaged can a corporation look back and find the reason. That's because it's multiple little reasons that were made in years past for short-term gains that lost the customers trust.
Trust in a personal relationship is hard to regain, but trust in a consumer to business relationship is almost impossible to regain.