The dilemma is that while customers obviously expect brand quality, they also want the convenience of technology. Parr said that COVID completely changed customer expectations—or rather, “techspectations.” “From a brand’s perspective, screwing this stuff up is much riskier than it’s ever been,” she said, “because coming out of COVID, we haven’t become nicer consumers. We’ve actually become less nice. Customers want it now, and they are less sympathetic to a bad experience.”
In fact, in a 2026 survey of consumer behavior across retail sectors conducted by cloud provider DOSS, 62% of consumers reported switching brands because an item was out of stock. Basically, she said, “customers want a frictionless life. [When buying online], they want a seamless omnichannel experience.”
But the quest for convenience can come at the cost of security, according to IBM Distinguished Engineer Jeff Crume. “I understand [merchants] don’t want a lot of friction in the buying process, because their customers just go somewhere else,” he said in an interview with IBM Think. “They’re going to choose the path of least resistance.” He pointed to the fact that many e-commerce sites still rely on the easy one-step, password-only login, for example. But logins are permeable, Crume said—and it’s not because cyber intruders all have supercomputers that analyze all possible password combinations, despite what you see in the movies. In real life, the phone call is often coming from inside the house.
“We’ve been saying for a while that the bad guys have realized it’s easier to log in than hack in,” Crume said. Most cyberattackers start by exploiting open-source intelligence (OSINT), say security experts. “Phishing attacks are probably the number one way to steal passwords,” Crume said. He offered a few examples: “I’ll send you a link and tell you that you won a contest, tell you ‘I’m your bank’ or say ‘I’m your boss and you need to log into a site to receive your new laptop.’ And then you log into what you think is a legitimate site, but the attackers just copy that stuff and then use it.”
The barrier of access to vulnerable systems is lowering. According to the Threat Intelligence Index, the past year has seen a 44% increase in the number of security breaches arising from the exploitation of public-facing applications, such as company websites or customer portals.
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