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There’s a fresh trend when it comes to fulfilling the mantra that the “customer is always right”:  Hiring customer experience managers. But, just adding headcount flies in the face of several business objectives, including gaining a holistic view of the customer over the account lifetime, and, of course, operational streamlining and cost-savings.

Getting the customer experience right reduces churn and drums up new business: According to figures from TeamSupport, nearly 70 percent of new business is influenced by word-of-mouth, and the quality of customer experience directly affects whether an individual or business will recommend your offering to others. Strong customer experiences can also reduce churn rates—and for every 5 percent that they go down, company profits increase by 25-125 percent.

Customer experience managers are often tasked with making sure the service organization is doing its job to the best of its ability. But having a person in that role may not be the wisest solution.

“These hires are supposed to help executives think outside the box, identify low-hanging fruit, disrupt the ecosystem and produce synergy across an organization,” explained Robert Johnson, CEO of TeamSupport, in a column. “While the problems this role was invented to address are real, there are better ways to deliver the best possible customer experience, no manager required.”

For instance, there’s no doubt that real breakdowns and bottlenecks exist in customer service, which lead to end user frustration and churn. In fact, 71 percent of consumers have ended their relationship with a company due to poor customer service. However, “before hiring a manager or forming a new team, executives should look at how existing customer support teams can be empowered and improved,” Johnson said.

This can be accomplished by giving customer service agents better technology and analytics with which to understand the customer better; a unified communications implementation can boost cross-channel information-sharing, or the ability to have service calls move from, say, a Web chat to a phone call seamlessly can serve the customer in a more personalized way.

Leveraging knowledge about the customer is part of this. “As anyone who has made a customer service call knows, there are few things more annoying and time-wasting than having to repeatedly tell people who you are, what products you use, what your problem is, and how you've already tried to resolve it,” Johnson said. Companies can make the customer support process more efficient by making sure that all information linked with the account—including past customer service implementations—is visible in an agent’s dashboard.

“The wealth of analytics and communication technology means no organization should be in the dark about what is going on with their customers,” Johnson said. “Every interaction should be tracked and synced so as to create a seamless and proactive support system. With real-time information, support staff can understand a customer's needs from the second they get on the call and make smarter recommendations for how to address them.”

And finally, companies should keep in mind that software can often do better, in an automated way, anything that a customer experience person can accomplish. If the concern is collaboration within departments, a manager would likely develop process flows and require numerous training meetings to educate staff on how they should interact with each other. This bumps up overhead and lessens productivity. A rules-based software engine, on the other hand, can evaluate what’s needed during customer interactions at every point along the customer's journey, from product development to sales—and make appropriate information available to team members via a collaboration platform.

“Customer experience management is a philosophy, not a position, and it does not require a dedicated person or team to spread these ideas,” Johnson concluded.