Large classes are an important element of higher education in the United States today. Pressures of increased enrollment and shrinking financial support are likely to insure the continued existence of large classes in our colleges and universities, even though a sizable proportion of both students and faculty view this technique of instruction as unsatisfactory. With increased size have come changes in the organization, atmosphere, activity, and acceptability of the classroom scene. In the typical large enrollment course, the professor meets the students en masse several times a week for lectures and demonstrations, and once a week the students are expected to attend small recitations

In service settings, customer satisfaction is often influenced by the quality of the interpersonal interaction between the customer and the contact employee. Previous research has identified the sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in service encounters from the customer's point of view; this study explores these sources in service encounters from the contact employee's point of view. Drawing on insights from role, script, and attribution theories, 774 critical service encounters reported by employees of the hotel, restaurant, and airline industries are analyzed and compared with previous research. Results generally support the theoretical predictions and also identify an additional source of customer dissatisfaction—the customer's own misbehavior. The findings have implications for business practice in managing service encounters, employee empowerment and training, and managing customers.

The service encounter frequently is the service from the customer's point of view. Using the critical incident method, the authors collected 700 incidents from customers of airlines, hotels, and restaurants. The incidents were categorized to isolate the particular events and related behaviors of contact employees that cause customers to distinguish very satisfactory service encounters from very dissatisfactory ones. Key implications for managers and researchers are highlighted.