Churnbreaker Consulting

Served as fractional VP of Customer Success and instructed start-ups on how to build scalable Customer Success departments. Coached CS leaders and CSMs to excellence in their role.  Consulted for VC firms on value propositions, challenges, and killer features of various industries.

Customer Success Director & Founder

Craft & Bauer Real Estate Co.

Hired to craft the CS/CX strategy for Craft & Bauer as their first CS/CX leader, designing new experiences and overhauling existing practices to ensure the most competitive offerings and drive customer-led growth.

Director of Customer Success

TutorMe

Created and led TutorMe’s first Customer Success team while reinventing the customer experience following a pivot to a new customer base, increasing revenue 4X in less than a year and playing a central role in TutorMe's acquisition in 2022.

• Generated 120% of annual revenue goal by renewing VIP clients at 11x, creating a new tier of multi-million-dollar customers.
• Achieved NPS scores far above our competitors through meticulous focus on demonstrating value to our clients in every interaction.
• Introduced new software tools and upgraded existing tools to allow for better integration and optimization, providing enormous gains in efficiency to make the CSM role scalable through periods of rapid growth.

Bambee

Recruited to bring innovative process improvement, SaaS leadership experience, and scalable customer engagement to the newly-pioneered Customer Success team. 

• Overhauled holistic Client Success strategy and operation, coaching and mentoring Client Success Managers to listen empathetically through the client’s lens, and act with urgency, compassion, consistent communication, and advocacy. This seismic shift in strategic approach ultimately reduced churn by 25%. 
• Strategically migrated from two off-shelf platforms, consolidating into a single tech platform with multiple attributes and API access to additional tools, in order to centralize and streamline support, drive higher client outcomes and engagement scores, and achieve efficiency within the Client Success organization.

SnackNation

Hired to expand the Client Success Team from 4 employees to 35 at SnackNation—an award-winning healthy snack delivery service—and place significant focus on coaching and mentoring all team members to continuously improve customer satisfaction and reduce membership cancellations. Reduced cancellations by 50% and grew team by 650% in 4-year period, while keeping employee retention above 85%. 

• Customer Success Team was awarded the 2019 CXPA Top Innovator Award for Customer Retention Engineering, a highly-competitive award distributed by the Customer Experience Professionals Association - see video link below for more intel! 
• Reduced cancellations by 50% and earned a “world-class” customer satisfaction rating from 93% of customers, by 1) increasing customization of our products and 2) coaching employees on how to best leverage experience engineering—using machine-based learning—to enhance value and outcomes with their customer communications.
• Led cross-team collaboration efforts for a new flagship product launch—the Sneak Peek Box—which exceeded churn reduction forecasts by 20%. 
• Pioneered effort to strategically expand into the Enterprise market—earning logos like Hulu and Sony—by developing new processes and systems to accommodate the unique needs of Enterprise customers.
• Mentored high-potential employees to develop them into senior or leadership roles to meet the needs of a fast-growing team.

TigerLead Solutions

Recruited to TigerLead Solutions - a lead generator platform for real estate professionals - in 2011 and promoted in early 2012 to Head of Client Success, with the charter of building a scalable Client Success operation focused on service delivery, a foundation of content management and self-help, employee and client retention, and improving the customer lifecycle journey.   TigerLead Solutions was acquired by Move, Inc (operator of Realtor.com) in 2012 for $22M. In 2014, News Corp acquired Move, Inc in a $950M cash deal. 

• Exceeded customer retention goals by equipping team with formal education and expertise in comprehensive understanding of the residential real estate market, customer advocacy and coaching, and effective up- and cross-sales techniques.
• Restructured the CS organization to accommodate unexpected rapid growth, developing two Account Representatives into effective Team Managers, backfilling individual contributor roles externally, and building a scalable headcount model in collaboration with Sales and Finance. 
• Played integral role in redesigning proprietary CRM by compiling customer feedback to establish business requirements, creating both employee and end-user training materials, and participating in recurring stakeholder progress meetings. 
• Launched the company’s first Customer Collaboration Group, organizing annual conferences and partnering with Product, Sales and Marketing to rally behind client engagement, presenting and gaining feedback on future roadmap, and better understanding prospective buyer personas. 
• Played central role in two major acquisition integrations in 2 years, more than doubling the team's account base and revenue in 100 days, and spring-boarding the Customer Success Team to maturity in final acquisition to publicly-traded company (News Corp).

Head of Client Success

Client Success Manager

I'm an award-winning Customer Success Executive who’s been building, scaling, and leading Customer Success teams for 14 years at rapid-growth B2B SaaS startups.

What does that actually look like? Well, I’ve been a key player in 3 startup exits, and I specialize in scaling quickly while slashing churn. I build powerful cultures of collaboration and personal development, and I've had the privilege of coaching dozens of Customer Success folks to new heights of excellence.

Much of my career has involved building Customer Success functions from scratch, so I do it all, from designing long-term strategy and great customer experiences to the hands-on work like writing playbooks and crafting elegant processes.

If you need someone to build or lead your Customer Success department, let’s talk about how I can help!

Taplio

Clay Telfer's Linkedin Analytics

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Taplio

.css-1jgreyo{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39,43,72,1) 0%, rgba(33,47,183,1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Clay Telfer's Linkedin Analytics

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Clay Telfer's Linkedin Analytics