Improving the customer experience and building barriers to lock customers are two key strategies employed by firms to enhance customer retention. Although pursuing the same goal, these strategies work differently: the former promotes the affective aspects of the relationship while the latter relies more on a calculative, cost–benefit approach to the exchange. Integrating experiential learning theory, we provide an integrative conceptual understanding of the separate and joint effects of customer experience and lock-in on customer retention. Using a dataset containing perceptual, competitive, and transactional information for a sample of 13,761 customers covering all firms in the telecom market for two different services, we empirically test the proposed framework via multinomial logit modeling. The results offer novel insights into the presence of trade-offs between these two key strategies. We show that with one lock-in, the role of customer experience becomes weaker. However, with multiple lock-in methods where negative interaction is captured, customer experience does matter. Our contribution consists of identifying whether customer experience and lock-in complement or substitute each other and when such effects occur, thereby helping firms optimally allocate marketing resources to retain customers.