Measuring the performance of services and making effective use of the results are critical for designing and delivering policies to improve people’s lives. Improving user satisfaction with public services is an objective in many OECD countries and is one of the indicators in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 16 of “Building effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”. This paper explores the use of satisfaction indicators to monitor citizens’ and users’ experience with public services. It finds that satisfaction indicators provide an accurate aggregate account of the factors driving service performance. At the same time, it shows that additional measures are needed to monitor the access, responsiveness and quality of public services, as well as to identify concrete areas of improvement. This paper provides examples of how countries use performance data in decision making (both subjective users’ experience and objective service outputs). It also highlights common challenges and good practices to strengthen performance measurement and management.