Customer integration, fairness perceptions, and silent endurance in digital versus human service interactions

Growing digitization is accompanied by a concomitant increase in customer integration, making the customer an even more integral part of service settings, to the extent that customers even may replace employee labor. Customer integration can have positive effects for service firms and customers, but it also threatens some negative effects that have not been studied closely. This study proposes silent endurance as a neglected outcome of customer integration, caused by violations of customer fairness perceptions. In line with fairness heuristic theory, providing more input for the same output may reduce perceptions of distributive fairness. Four studies test this theorizing (one critical incident study and three experiments) to investigate the effect of being integrated on customers’ distributive fairness and silent endurance. Stable results across studies show that distributive fairness mediates the link between customer integration and silent endurance; offering monetary advantages can offset integration-induced losses of fairness perceptions. These findings thus have both theoretical and managerial implications.