Outcome-Driven Customer Success

Building, Scaling, and Leading Customer Success Teams to increased retention and revenue growth since 2011

Are you ready to slash your churn and multiply your revenue?

My name is Clay Telfer, and I’m here to solve your problems.

That’s what we do in Customer Success: we solve people’s problems. We make their lives easier. And when we do it right, revenue goes up - way, way up.

Retention and upsell go through the roof. Adoption times get lower and NPS scores get higher. Customers start offering referrals and testimonials instead of dodging your emails and calls.

But that doesn’t happen without real Customer Success expertise. In today’s market, 9 out of 10 companies are trying to compete on customer experience. It’s no longer good enough just to have your marketing or support team put something together.

That’s what I’m here for. I’ve personally built half a dozen Customer Success functions, and I’ve coached and consulted on building dozens more. With 13 years of experience as a Customer Success executive, I know what works and what doesn’t work.

Your competitors are hiring experts. Shouldn’t you do the same?

Clay Telfer, Churnbreaker Customer Success Consulting

Driving Churn down and building people up

Is your organization on the path to positive disruption – shaking up the status quo in a way that makes life better and easier for your customers?

I work with leadership teams to build world-class, award-winning Customer Success functions. Whether you need to overhaul an existing department or build something from scratch, you’ve come to the right place!

Since 2011, my track record includes coaching and developing the next generation of customer success professionals as well as helping companies renew and upsell their high-value accounts to crush their projections and goals.

The services I offer include serving as Fractional VP of Customer Success, building you a scalable and sustainable CS function, designing your company’s customer strategy, coaching for everyone from new CSMs to Customer Success executives, and much more.

an Exceptional Record of success

In my role as Customer Success leader at various companies, I have:

  • Played a major role in 3 successful acquisition exits in 10 years. 

  • Built, trained, led, and rapidly scaled a new Customer Success department that 4X’d annual revenue in less than a year.

  • Generated 120% of annual revenue goal by renewing VIP clients at 11X, creating a new tier of multi-million-dollar customers.

  • Reduced customer adoption time by 36% and churn by 25% with a holistic client success strategy and operation overhaul, including coaching and mentoring a team of Client Success Managers (CSMs) to act with urgency, compassion, consistent communication, and advocacy for clients.

  • Achieved NPS scores far above competitors through meticulous focus on demonstrating value to new clients at every interaction.

  • Expanded client success team from 4 employees to 35 at an award-winning startup, reducing cancellations by 50% and keeping employee retention above 85% in a 4-year period.

  • Earned a “world-class” customer satisfaction rating from 93% of customers by increasing the customization of products and coaching employees on best practices to leverage experience engineering to enhance value and customer outcomes.

  • Led cross-team collaboration efforts for a new flagship product launch that exceeded churn reduction forecasts by 20%.

  • Pioneered efforts to strategically expand into the enterprise market by developing new processes and systems to accommodate the unique needs of enterprise customers, earning the business of household-name logos like Hulu and Sony.

  • Doubled the company’s account base and revenue in 100 days following a major acquisition.

  • Introduced new software tools, upgraded existing tools to allow for better integration and optimization, used machine-based learning, and strategically migrated from multiple off-shelf platforms to consolidate to a single-tech platform to centralize and streamline customer support, driving higher client outcomes and engagement scores, achieving gains in efficiency and making CSM roles scalable through periods of rapid growth.

CX Innovation Awards Winner

Awarded the CXPA Top Innovator Award for Customer Retention Engineering by the Customer Experience Professionals Association.

leadership Talks & appearances

Raise your hand if you want to expand customers at your company.

Raise your hand if you want to reduce cancellations at your company.

Raise your hand if you want to decrease adoption time at your company.

I spoke at the ElevateCX 2023 conference on how to decrease churn, achieve faster adoption times, and earn greater customer expansion with customer-centric onboarding processes.

View the full playlist here.

Working With Clay

  • "Clay's approach to Customer Experience was innovative and had an immediate positive impact on the business. He provided a strategy and roadmap to achieve the organization's goals. His deep understanding of customers' changing expectations and his effective collaboration with stakeholders and key partners makes him a strong leader in the Customer Experience space."

    – Halima M.

  • "Clay is excellent at assessing situations and understanding how decisions will impact the broader system. He is a competent problem-solver and cleverly solves challenging and complex issues in the most efficient way possible. The quick scaling of our team from 5 to 30 employees would not have been possible without Clay's attention to detail and proactive mindset."

    – Chelsie R.

  • "Clay was a pleasure to work with. He's always focused on producing a better product, a better client experience, and a better image of the company. He's goal oriented, a hard worker, and does a great job of proactively identifying problems and working to solve them before they happen. After our first acquisition, Clay was able to double the size of his department in only three months while reducing employee turnover on his team to zero."

    – Ashley S.

  • "Clay has been one of the most impactful people in my career. He was so skilled, so patient and an overall wonderful teacher of all things customer success and customer experience. I constantly reference things Clay taught me. He truly took the Customer Success team at SnackNation from good to great. He helped our team be world class customer success professionals."

    – Katie B.

  • Clay has produced wonders for our members in the nearly three years that I have worked with him. His constant eye towards our member experience is what lead SnackNation to have such dedicated and loyal members across the country.

    – Maor M.