CVO Specialists; skills, responsibilities, and where to find them.

So, you caved in and decided to bring a Customer Value Optimization Specialist on board to help your company deliver more value to your customers. 

Yet, you’re now lost in the details: where do you find this person, and what does a CVO Specialist profile look like?

Worry not – as CVO Evangelists, we’ve put together the ultimate Customer Value Optimization Specialist guide.

From the skills and responsibilities required for this critical role and practical tips for finding the right candidate, read on to discover what a CVO Specialist can (and should) do for your business.

By the end of this article, you will know precisely what the CVO Specialist role entails, which skills are required, and how to train your teams and empower them to become certified Customer Value Optimization Specialists.

Understanding what Customer Value Optimization Is

We can only discuss the role of a Customer Value Optimization Specialist by first looking at CVO as a concept and understanding what it truly means. 

Customer Value Optimization represents a methodology that helps you improve Customer Lifetime Value by maximizing the value you offer your customers. 

There’s a common misconception in the digital space, as people still consider CLV a way to earn more money from their current customers. While the end result is the same (improved loyalty, better acquisition, long-term retention, and revenue), what makes the difference is the mindset behind the process.

CLV isn’t about extracting more value; it’s about offering more value and servicing your customers more effectively.

At its core, the CVO process comes down to analyzing your first-party data, then using the generated insights to inform your customer experience, acquisition, and retention strategies.

For the process to work, all departments within your organization must be aligned, following the same North-Star Metric: Customer Lifetime Value. It will take the unified efforts of marketing, sales, product, and customer success departments to successfully identify opportunities for Customer Value Optimization at every touchpoint in the customer journey.

All in all, Customer Value Optimization isn’t a sprint or a one-time task. It’s a marathon, a journey made out of many milestones and obstacles, innovation and errors, and highs & lows. 

However, the result is always worth the effort. You will come out of it stronger, wiser, and with a more solid customer base and well-established brand recognition.

Understanding the concept in itself allows you to understand the role of a CVO Specialist.

A Customer Value Optimization Specialist, is the professional who specialises in improving the value your customers are getting from your business. CVO Specialists focus on understanding customer behavior and preferences, optimizing the customer journey, and increasing customer lifetime value.

Customer Value Optimization Specialist Responsibilities 

The role of a CVO Specialist is highly dynamic, and each day is unique, with no two days being the same. 

This happens because a CVO Strategy implicates cross-functional processes. Professionals from different backgrounds should participate and actively influence the actions in optimizing the Customer’s Lifetime Value. 

Here are the responsibilities a CVO Specialist will have on a day-to-day basis – however, these tasks are flexible, as the world of Value Optimization is fluid and unexpected challenges might arise on the road. 

• Analysing Customer Data

CVO strategies heavily rely on your customers’ behaviors; therefore, a CVO Strategist must monitor and analyze customer data, then extract insights from it. 

These insights must then inform decisions related to customer acquisition, customer experience and engagement, customer retention, and driving revenue growth.

• Strategizing 

Besides a solid analytical mind, a CVO Expert must also be a good strategist. A big part of his responsibilities will be designing and implementing strategies to improve the CLV.

A strategy can draw strings from any department – it can involve the marketing team for personalized communication (someone who finds qualified leads and converts those leads), the customer success department for ticketing, and even the management teams for uprooting and changing faulty processes.

• Experimentation.

Your CVO Strategist should orchestrate various experiments and tests to measure the impact of his strategies on customer behavior and CLV. 

A good strategist will make data-driven decisions about which strategies to pursue, steering away from gut feelings or following the latest trends.

This chapter focused on a high-level listing of the primary responsibilities of a strategist. However, his tasks will become increasingly granular as he advances through the CVO Methodology. 

To get a deeper understanding of what it means to be a CVO Strategist, here’s the step-by-step plan for a successful Customer Value Optimization process:

• Step 1: Lose vanity and shallow metrics and focus on the KPIs that matter in the long term. 
• Step 2: Track and Monitor Customer Lifetime Value and the KPIs that are affecting it (CX, product reviews, NPS, Effort Score / Retention / RFM distribution/ Margin / Cohort Stickiness / New Customer Stickiness)
• Steps 3- 6: Conduct Qualitative and Quantitative Customer Research (we’re strongly recommending the Jobs-to-be-done methodology).
• Step 7: Orchestrate the retention strategy
• Step 8: Track and monitor results, and conduct ongoing optimization as your business evolves.
• Step 9: Build ongoing personalization campaigns for your customers across all channels.

Many responsibilities can arise from this methodology, and a CVO Specialist will oversee the creation, management, and execution of your CVO initiatives. 

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Job Brief – Example

If you want to hire a good CVO strategist, write a killer job brief for recruitment. This is a highly sought-after role, as CLV is the one metric that can help any eComm & Retail company grow, so CVO Specialists are in high demand. 

Steer away from cliches, be honest and transparent about your processes, and offer fair treatment to your candidates. 

As for the ideal candidate, you’re looking for a results-driven, creative, and analytical individual. Search for professionals who are genuinely passionate about the customer experience, care about the value they’re offering, and have experience in CRM-related roles. 

An example of a Job Brief for a CVO Strategist looks like this: 

• Develop and execute a comprehensive CVO process, including the marketing strategy, the approach for customer relationships, and sales funnels. 
• Work with marketing and creative teams to create and implement engaging content that drives customer engagement and retention.
• Conduct ongoing analysis and optimization of CVO campaigns to ensure maximum effectiveness and ROI.
• Collaborate with the sales team to develop targeted campaigns that support lead generation and sales conversion efforts.
• Monitor and report on key performance metrics, providing regular updates and recommendations for improvement
• Analyze customer data and feedback about the product assortment to identify profit maximizers and push them in creative acquisition campaigns.
• Stay up-to-date on industry trends and best practices, incorporating them into CVO strategies and initiatives.

When it comes to experience and qualifications, don’t be a stickler about traditional education or years of experience. Keep in mind that CVO is still a new methodology, and finding someone with 5+ years of experience in the field is almost impossible.

Instead, look for people who genuinely desire to provide value through their work, are fearless of new challenges, or work religiously at a lengthy task without seeing instant results.

Requirements and Skills for a Customer Value Optimization Specialist

It’s important to understand that a single person can’t possibly carry out the task of Optimizing Customer Value. 

If you’re determined to turn Customer Value Optimization into a priority, you should invest in building a solid team of professionals who can execute the strategies orchestrated by your CVO Strategist. 

However, your strategist must understand each step of the strategy and even master the necessary skills for implementing his ideas. 

Thus said, here are the skills you should be looking for when trying to bring a CVO Specialist on board:

• Data Analysis

Your CVO Specialist must be comfortable working with data and analyzing customer behavior.

Because truth lies in the data, you need someone who can see the meaning behind the numbers and quickly identify opportunities for optimization. 

At the same time, this person has to be familiar with data analytics tools and techniques, such as data visualization and segmentation.

• Research

Besides extracting meaning from numbers, a CVO Specialist should also be capable of conducting customer surveys and interviews, then analyzing responses to get a look behind the curtain regarding customer needs, preferences, and pain points. 

If data gives you quantitative insights, the research part unveils the “why” behind the numbers; therefore, a CVO Specialist should be able to synthesize research data and develop it into an Ideal Customer Profile and journey maps for each customer segment.

• Marketing Automation

A strong pillar of CVO is what you say – meaning, your marketing processes. For CVO to succeed, you must decode customers’ needs into persuasive messages that attract and entice them.

So, a CVO Strategist must be fluent in digital marketing and familiar with marketing automation tools, such as email marketing, conversion funnels, a return path, lead scoring, and customer segmentation. 

The strategist should be able to design personalized campaigns that target specific customer segments.

For example, let’s look at an acquisition campaign. 

Even if your specialist isn’t setting up and launching the campaign himself, he should think of powerful messages to acquire more customers and understand the threshold for ​​customer acquisition costs you can’t afford to cross. 

• A/B Testing

Since CLV moves beyond gut feelings and relies on data-driven decisions, you need the same data-driven approach to understanding the impact of your processes. 

The CVO Specialist has to be experienced in A/B testing and experimentation to measure the impact of his ideas on customers’ behaviors and, ultimately, on your overall Customer Lifetime Value. 

So, look for someone more than a simple optimization expert. Look for a person who can design and execute experiments for all customer journey touchpoints, then analyze the results to determine the next steps for your strategy. 

In a nutshell, this is the end of the hard-skill chapter of this section. 

However, the fun continues because your CVO Specialist should also demonstrate specific soft skills. 

While the first part of the skill requirements can be trained and improved in time, you will need a more radical approach with the following skills – the candidate either has them or not. 

• Collaboration skills

As you saw, Customer Value Optimization isn’t a one-person job. In fact, Customer Lifetime Value is a metric that belongs to the CEO. Therefore, it’s everyone’s job to contribute to this metric. 

The person in charge of CVO has to be comfortable working with cross-functional teams, including marketing, sales, product, and customer success. 

He should have excellent communication and collaboration skills. He needs to know how to delegate, deliver, and receive feedback so that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goal.

• Strategic Thinking

Customer Value Optimization is more about understanding the difference between immediate and lifetime customer value and thinking long-term than quick wins and results. 

While stakeholders are impatient and need to understand the ROI of their resource allocation, the CVO Specialist needs to keep a clear mind and anticipate potential outcomes and consequences of decisions. 

Look for someone with the mental bandwidth to analyze complex situations, identify roadblocks, and create effective solutions aligning with your goals and objectives.

• Hunger for learning

Customer Value Optimization is a fascinating and rewarding endeavor. However, it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it task. It’s a continuous analysis and optimization journey. 

A CVO Strategist must be curious and open-minded and actively seek new knowledge and skills. He has to be open to feedback, embrace new experiences and ideas, and be willing to step out of his comfort zone to grow alongside his team.

As you can see, your CVO Strategist is a jack-of-all-trades person. 

He has to be comfortable with complex data and mathematical analysis while also being fluent in digital tools and having the ability to innovate and develop creative strategies. 

Few people can excel in such different areas of work, so we recommend building a solid team, each member being a pro on their own turf. Your strategist needs to have a working understanding of each skill we’ve listed. However, he should only plan and prioritize the processes making up the CVO Strategy.

He will orchestrate the projects and delegate the tasks to his team, then manage, help, and support that team. 

Train Your Teams to Become Customer Value Optimization Specialists

Instead of scouring the Internet (and job portals) to find “The One,” why not invest in your teams and give them access to a professional training?

We’re confident you already have someone in mind. That employee who’s energetic, a do-er, the one you can always count on to get the job done. 

Help him grow and become more efficient and effective in his role. Give him the tools for increased productivity, better performance, and better organizational results. 

Take a look at The CVO Academy, where A-level experts will walk students through advanced CVO tactics that set your eCommerce store for success.

From acquisition to retention, the CVO Academy covers it all. By the end of it, each member of your team can become a certified Customer Value Optimization Specialist. 

After going through the Academy, your teams will amaze you with new ideas and innovations to drive growth and success for your organization. 

Check out the entire curriculum and decide whether this investment will pay off in the short and long term.

Wrap Up

As you can see, the job of a Customer Value Optimization Specialist is much like a rollercoaster ride, with thrilling ups and downs that keep things exciting and engaging.

Whether you find this colleague in the wild or train your teams with The CVO Academy, know that a good CVO specialist can help take your business to the next level.

Good luck in your search, and may the odds be ever in your favor!

Frequently Asked Questions about the CVO Specialist