ABSTRACT
This chapter looks in very general terms at the design of performance management systems, considering first the choice of metric and then the uses to which performance information may be put. It considers performance at the micro-level of the individual service encounter, and at the macro-level of the organization as a whole. There are some knotty issues here, notably how to decide what needs tracking, who to involve in the decision, how information should be gathered, and how to ensure that the entire system is not only measuring what matters but is doing it cost-effectively. Service recovery efforts might range in scale from an operations control centre trying to get aircraft and crews back onto the published schedule after a major weather disruption, down to a customer service representative dealing with a single passenger's missed connection. Service recovery is an integral part of defections management.
