When a measure becomes the objective, it ceases to be a good measure.
Even if you could perfectly measure customer happiness (very hard, as you note) - it's relatively easy to make customers happy by giving them more value than what they pay for. Sure, that may cost your business more money than what it makes with said customers, but hey, who cares, "profit" was not the metric...
(and as you note, if you make "profit" the metric, that has its own set of challenges - e.g. the optimization towards short-term profit in detriment of the long-term sanity, which is what we observe in a lot of corporations).
>> When a measure becomes the objective, it ceases to be a good measure.
Yes and no in this case. Yes, you can naked customers happier with more value, more overhead (ie more support staff and do on.)
Yes, in the short term this might reduce profit. If you go too far down this road you might go bankrupt. No measure works if you dont use the "can we afford it" metric.
But nothing turbo-charges profits (in the short, and more importantly, long term) than happy customers. Ultimately they pay more, theny pay more often, they encourage others to pay.
If you optimize for happy customers, and stay solvent, you have the foundation for a solid long-term business.
I will add that starting with Happy Users (who get stuff for free) and turning them into Happy Customers later is really really hard. Simply giving the thing away (or charging so little it amounts to the same thing) is not what I'm suggesting. You can start with a lower price, yes, but regular price hikes are part of yhe process until uou find your natural price level.
Even if you could perfectly measure customer happiness (very hard, as you note) - it's relatively easy to make customers happy by giving them more value than what they pay for. Sure, that may cost your business more money than what it makes with said customers, but hey, who cares, "profit" was not the metric...
(and as you note, if you make "profit" the metric, that has its own set of challenges - e.g. the optimization towards short-term profit in detriment of the long-term sanity, which is what we observe in a lot of corporations).