Customers Are Threatening to Leave Less Often. Nearly Half Say There's Nowhere to Go.
· CX Pulse
VML's Future Shopper 2026 finds fewer customers threatening to leave while more say the experience got worse. Retention like that is on loan.
Customers Are Threatening to Leave Less Often. Nearly Half Say There's Nowhere to Go.
VML published the tenth edition of its Future Shopper report last Thursday. 28,000 consumers, 17 countries. The headline number looks like good news for anyone who owns a retention target: 48% of shoppers say they won't do business with a brand that fails their basic digital expectations, down from 51% in last year's edition. The share who regularly abandon a purchase over a frustrating online experience fell too, from 45% to 41%.
Three points of improvement on the scariest number in the deck. Most CX dashboards would turn green.
The same report says the experience got worse.
47% of the people VML asked say the online platforms they used to love have become worse over time. 44% say search quality declined in the past year. 55% say sponsored results make it harder to find the best product. And the line that changes the reading of every other number: 46% say there's no good alternative even when the experience is getting worse. That last figure comes from CX Dive's report on the study, which is also where Forrest Morgeson, a Michigan State marketing professor and director of research emeritus at the American Customer Satisfaction Index, put the mechanism in one sentence. Leaving, he said, "is something they can't afford."
So the two pairs move in opposite directions. Willingness to walk away is falling. Dissatisfaction is rising. The gap between them is a customer who has decided to stay and isn't happy about it.
ACSI's own national number says the same thing from the other side. Its second quarter release in August recorded a drop in U.S. customer satisfaction surpassed only once this century, during the pandemic supply shock, while customer complaints reached record levels. ACSI founder Claes Fornell described the result as "pent-up customer defection." Pent up is the operative phrase. The defection has been earned. It hasn't been collected yet.
What this looks like inside a large CX organization
If you run retention for a company with real market share, this is the quarter to be suspicious of your own good news. Churn came down. Repeat rate held. The board deck says loyalty. The question the deck can't answer is whether people stayed because they wanted to or because the alternative cost more than the annoyance.
Three cuts separate the two, and most reporting stacks can produce all three this week:
Complaint rate against churn. Complaints per thousand orders climbing while churn stays flat is the signature of a captive base. Happy customers don't complain more and leave less at the same time.
Repeat purchase among customers who complained. Pull everyone who filed a complaint in the past two quarters and check whether they bought again. If they did, the complaint came back with them, still open.
Retention by alternative density. Segment by how many competitors a customer could realistically switch to, by category, by region, by contract. Where alternatives are thin, retention is worth less than it looks. That's the segment that leaves in a block the day a competitor fixes its checkout.
The uncomfortable version of this is that a lot of enterprise retention in 2026 is on loan. Concentration, switching costs, and a shopper too worried about money to spend an afternoon moving accounts are doing the work that satisfaction used to do. That holds right up until it doesn't, and the ACSI complaint line is the early warning.
What it looks like for a smaller operator
You have the opposite problem, and it's a cleaner one. Nobody is stuck with you. A customer who hits a broken checkout on your site has a dozen alternatives one tab away, and none of them cost anything to try. For you the 41% who abandon over a frustrating experience is a floor, and nothing holds that number below 100 except the experience itself.
The upside is that your retention, whatever it is, is real. Every repeat customer you have chose you against a market that made choosing easy. That's the one advantage a large captive competitor can't copy, and it's the reason to fix the checkout friction before the price.
Either way, the reading is the same. A customer who stays because there's nowhere else to go is retention on loan. The lender is whoever fixes their experience first.
Source: VML, The Future Shopper 2026, via PR Newswire, September 17, 2026.