Blinded by Monopoly

I work for a company who makes dental software. In fact we were one of the pioneers of the dental software age. Our software makes it easier for dentists to keep track of their appointments, fill out insurance claims and get them transmitted with greater ease and efficiency to the insurance companies. We've tried to sense the needs of dentists and stay ahead of the game. On top of our core product we have an electronic services division. This allows an office to send their patient's claims in electronic form to us as opposed to printing and mailing them to the various companies. We try to be a one stop shop for dental offices so we offer services to which we generally don't make money but it gives us loyalty. We offer a remote backup service, a billing statement service where the office can have us mail their patients their billing statements saving them stamps and paper and time. We offer an appointment reminder service, a website building service, and an insurance verification service. All the services that an office needs to successfully operate in this new age. We were one of the pioneers of that service too.
First Movers and Market Share
Economists talk about a "first mover" advantage in gaining market share. This basically means that those who first pioneer a service gain a larger share of the market early on and this gives them an advantage. Until competitors come along they own a monopoly. In our case for many, many years we owned the monopoly on this service but in recent years a slew of competitors have popped up everywhere. What's unique about these competitors is that they're able to transmit an office's electronic claims (our electronic service's flagship offering) for a tenth of what we do. We charge 50 cents per claim and many of our competitors are charging one flat low monthly charge and we are BLEEDING Customers. They are cancelling left and right. Our company has taken the position that although these competitors can process claims cheaper our "service" is better, and their programs aren't very well integrated with the core software (which most offices retain despite using another claims processing company). The funny thing is that most of our company is drinking the Kool-Aid and really believe that because our software integrates with the core software better that it is a big enough plus to keep customers with our company. They're wrong. Think about it this way, if you're an office who sends 1000 claims a month with us you may get a better integrated software but you're still paying us $500 a month to process your claims whereas our competitors will charge you a flat $50 (1/10th of what we charge)to transmit all of your claims but the software isn't perfectly integrated(but mostly integrated, what would you do?
When a company is the pioneer of a service they set the price level, and in this case they set it pretty high. Our company has enjoyed being the monopoly for this service for so long that they are now unwilling to see how many customers they are losing because they're comfortable. Now, from an employee's perspective I'm okay with them keeping their prices the way they are because if we went as low as our competitors I'd be out of a job, but from a business point of view their unwillingness to adapt to the market is turning into their downfall.
Communication
I've often wondered if perhaps upper management has no idea why we're losing offices. For example, my boss has us calling on offices whose volume of claims submitted has dropped--to see why they've stopped sending so much. When we got this assignment I was actually pretty impressed. This, in my mind, is market research. The company genuinely wants to know why we're losing people, hopefully they'll take our findings and adapt their business model. I WAS WRONG! No we make notes in our reports but our reports are never looked at by our immediate managers so they're obviously not passed on to upper management. I mean, why have your employees try to find out why companies have stopped using us if you're not going to follow up on their response? This is a huge failing that many companies have: they have reports and research done but once it's done they don't do anything with the data. An effective company would be frantic about finding out why these offices are leaving. They'd track trends, they'd do surveys to see what element of our competitors persuaded them to leave us, they'd do everything they can to get their customer's back...but they don't. This is a symptom of a deeper issue, they don't care for their customer. They do on the surface, it's a business buzzworthy subject to say "Our customers are our greatest asset" but it's one thing to say it (and they do) and a whole other thing to translate that to action.