The Sync Up: A Conversation with Customer Experience VP Chris Aston

July 21, 2022

The Sync Up: A Conversation with Customer Experience VP Chris Aston

Providing holistic support is central to everything we do at 1WorldSync. We offer expansive education and training opportunities, host a peer-to-peer community platform and ensure we have true product content and standards experts for 24/7 live support, all to enable confident commerce with every one of our customers. 

Leading our customer support efforts with expert management is our Vice President of Customer Experience, Chris Aston. With over 30 years of experience in the software industry, Chris joined 1WorldSync ten months ago and is working to unite our support teams for efficient and effective results. Chris outlines the 1WorldSync approach to support and service in this interview.

1WorldSync services over 14,000 global customers. What does managing that expansive of a customer network look like?

Every 1WorldSync customer is without doubt important, and every customer has to be supported in the most efficient and productive way possible. That’s why we provide a range of services that fit all our customers’ requirements. We have three pillars within CX. Technical support, services and customer care. Technical support is made up of first and second-level support, and it really is the production room for answering all of our customers daily. Our customer care team is there to give the white glove service to our high value customers. The services team has four different areas: customer training, our user community, our professional services team, which is there for onboarding and implementation for new customers and advanced services to existing customers, and our product support specialist group which deals with some of the more advanced and complex issues that we have. 

We’re working to expand our user community now over the next 12-24 months because it’s a critical part of our business that can serve our entire customer base. We’ll be adding functionality to make it easier to navigate with specific areas of interest, link it to our ticketing system and introduce a learning management system. Other activities we are working on now include ensuring all 1WorldSync products are supported as we expand and acquire new solutions and growing the capabilities of our CX team for more focused and efficient results.

As 1WorldSync has grown its capabilities with internal improvements and acquisitions, how has the customer experience changed?

Each company that we’ve acquired brought its own support organization. Each individually provides great support, however, in their own slightly different way. Hence, we had been very siloed in our approach to support for our customers. The result of that is a customer would receive a completely different customer journey based on the product that they were actually purchasing. Now, the CX team is working to provide our customers with the same experience, irrespective of the product. We are doing so by structuring the CX team by activity rather than product. This is leading to a more streamlined process for each customer.

What can a new 1WorldSync customer expect from your team and the organization?

As we evolve the organization, a new customer can expect to receive the best practices and services that were in operation previously in our product support teams. We’ve selected what each of our support teams did really well and ensured they were emphasized in the new CX team structure. Our goal is simple: to provide consistent quality support and services delivered efficiently to all customers irrespective of product, size or location.

Our goal is simple: to provide consistent quality support and services delivered efficiently to all customers irrespective of product, size or location.

Chris Aston

You cited your CX philosophy as: structure, systems, process, technology and continuous improvement. Is there a part of this philosophy that you value most?

If I had to pick a single one of those elements that was most important, it would be continuous improvement, because of the human aspect of it. Systems, processes and technology are of course important, but easy to replace. But continuous improvement is about our people and without our people, we would not exist. 

You described CX’s differences from Customer Support, saying that CX is two-way, has multiple touch points and describes an ongoing customer journey. What parts of that journey stand out to you as most crucial?

Our perception of an organization is quite often determined by the quality and the consistency of the communication that we receive from it. This communication can be human and non-human throughout the customer journey. It’s crucial that our customer touch points are aligned, from the form on our website to our chat system to the sales team communication and responses from our technical support teams. It’s all about having the consistency of communication as a customer goes through that journey and views us as one 1WorldSync.

How is 1WorldSync positioned to help brands and retailers succeed?

We are growing in a way that is very intentional. We aim to be a one-stop-shop for our customers so that if they are looking for a solution they don’t have to go elsewhere. We’re carefully developing internal capabilities and acquiring new solutions to be the best partner to our customers.

What does it mean to you to be a 1WorldSync leader?

I’m proud to be a leader in the company. 1WorldSync is an exciting place to be. Ultimately, leadership is about the people and I’m really blessed to work with the CX team. There’s so much passion, dedication and commitment from that team that I consider myself lucky to be a part of it. I have loved every minute of my 1WorldSync journey thus far over the past 10 months, and am certainly looking forward to the future. I believe it to be very bright.