Jay Baer
Customers now judge a company by how fast it responds and how it handles the people who complain. Most organisations treat speed and complaints as service problems, when in commercial terms they are the largest available source of growth and the largest unmanaged source of churn. The gap between what customers expect of responsiveness and what companies deliver is where revenue quietly leaks.
Jay Baer is a customer experience and marketing strategist who helps organisations turn responsiveness, complaint handling, and word of mouth into measurable commercial advantage.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jay Baer
- He has built first-party research, not opinion, into the link between speed and revenue, including the finding that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting.
- He treats complaints as a growth channel, with a working method (Hug Your Haters) used by service and CX teams inside large consumer and B2B brands.
- He gives marketing and CX leaders a named framework for engineering word of mouth on purpose, drawn from Talk Triggers and case studies including DoubleTree, Five Guys, and The Cheesecake Factory.
- He has advised more than 700 companies through Convince & Convert, including roughly 30 of the FORTUNE 500, so the boardroom examples are first hand, not borrowed.
- He is one of a small group of speakers in this category to hold both CSP and CPAE Hall of Fame recognition from the National Speakers Association, which is a useful signal for buyers booking high-stakes general sessions.
Biography highlights
- Founder of Convince & Convert, a customer experience and marketing strategy firm advising 700+ brands since 2008.
- Author of seven business books, including the New York Times bestseller Youtility, Hug Your Haters, Talk Triggers, and The Time to Win.
- Inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame by the National Speakers Association, holds CSP designation.
- Clients cited across his consulting and advisory work include Nike, Oracle, Salesforce, Caterpillar, Allstate, and the United Nations.
- Author of the proprietary Time to Win research on customer responsiveness, including the finding that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting.
- Co-founder and editor of The Tequila Report, with a subscriber base above 50,000 and a substantial second-career media presence.
Biography
Most companies still treat customer service as a cost centre and word of mouth as a happy accident. Both assumptions are wrong, and both are expensive. The work that defines Jay Baer’s career has been to convert each of them into something a leadership team can actually manage.
Through Convince & Convert, the strategy firm he founded in 2008, Baer has advised more than 700 companies on customer experience and marketing, including around 30 of the FORTUNE 500. Named clients include Nike, Oracle, Salesforce, Caterpillar, and the United Nations. The books carry the same operating logic into a wider audience: Youtility on help-as-marketing reached number three on the New York Times business list, Hug Your Haters reframed complaints as a retention asset, and Talk Triggers, written with Daniel Lemin, set out a structured method for engineering word of mouth using case studies from DoubleTree, Five Guys, and The Cheesecake Factory.
His most recent book, The Time to Win, is the sharpest expression of the argument. It is built on proprietary research showing that two thirds of customers now rate speed as important as price, that more than half hire the first company to respond, and that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting. For CX and commercial leaders, the implication is direct: response time is a pricing variable.
Recognition tracks the substance. Baer was inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame by the National Speakers Association in 2018 and holds the CSP designation, two credentials held simultaneously by a small minority of working speakers. The practical consequence for buyers is reliability under pressure: he is one of the relatively few keynote choices in this category that large general sessions and senior leadership audiences both tend to find credible.
Key speaking topics
- Customer experience strategy
- Customer responsiveness and speed to revenue
- Word of mouth as a managed marketing discipline
- Complaint handling and customer retention
- Practical AI for customer-facing teams
- Marketing as customer help, not interruption
Ideal for
- Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Customer Officers, and Chief Experience Officers setting CX or growth agendas
- Sales, service, and contact-centre leaders being asked to convert responsiveness into commercial outcomes
- Franchise, hospitality, retail, and B2B brands where word of mouth is a material growth lever
- Annual conferences and leadership offsites that need a senior keynote with general-session range
Audience outcomes
- A defensible position on why response time should be treated as a commercial metric, not a service KPI
- A working method for converting customer complaints into a retention and acquisition channel
- A repeatable approach to engineering word of mouth, with named operational examples to adapt
- A clearer view of where AI plausibly belongs inside customer-facing workflows, and where it does not
- Specific, named case studies the audience can quote in their own internal conversations the next week
Talks
A research-led keynote on why responsiveness has become the single largest lever in customer experience, and how to operationalise it.
Key takeaways:
- The proprietary Time to Win research findings on speed, price, and customer choice
- A six-part framework for tuning responsiveness across functions and channels
- Named examples of organisations turning faster response into measurable revenue
A practical session on how to treat customer complaints as a retention and growth channel rather than a service cost.
Key takeaways:
- The two distinct types of complainers and what each one actually wants
- A working method for responding in public and private channels without escalation
- Why ignoring critics is statistically more damaging than answering them badly
A keynote on engineering word of mouth as a managed discipline, drawn from the book co-authored with Daniel Lemin.
Key takeaways:
- The four requirements that make any operational choice worth talking about
- The five categories of talk trigger leaders can build into their business
- Case studies from DoubleTree, Five Guys, The Cheesecake Factory, and Penn & Teller
A session on where AI realistically belongs inside customer-facing teams, and where it makes things worse.
Key takeaways:
- A working test for which customer interactions should be automated and which should not
- Examples of AI deployments that have improved both speed and customer satisfaction
- A view on what changes for marketing and CX roles over the next two to three years