Key Findings & Highlights:

In 2013, Accenture Interactive acquired both Fjord and Acquity Group to form the foundation of its experience design and implementation services; adding ~800 employees across the two companies with locations across the U.S. and Europe. Since these acquisitions, Accenture Interactive has made a series of acquisitions to expand its design capabilities both geographically and functionally. Between 2014 and 2017 it made nine experience and design acquisitions. It made a further seven across 2018 and 2019. These acquisitions include:

• May 2018: Accenture acquired Shanghai-based HO Communication, a full-service digital marketing agency with ~200 employees and offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, and Nanjing
• November 2018: Accenture acquired German creative agency Kolle Rebbe. Founded in 1994, Kolle Rebbe employs ~300 artists, designers, digital designers, technologists, concept engineers and copywriters at its Hamburg headquarters
• March 2019: Accenture acquired ?What If!, a privately-owned innovation consultancy founded in 1992 that uses an experimentation-driven approach to help clients incubate new products, services, business models and organizational cultures. Headquartered in London, with additional offices in New York and Shanghai, ?What If! has ~150 employees and brings in capabilities in strategy, insight and research, ideation, design and commercial analytics
• April 2019: Accenture acquired New York-based creative agency Droga5
• September 2019: Accenture Interactive acquired service design and research firm INSITUM, expanding its design and innovation unit Fjord in Latin America, giving it a footprint in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, while strengthening its operations in Brazil. INSITUM was founded in 2003 and has ~200 designers, researchers and strategists based in its Mexico City HQ or studios in Barcelona, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Lima and São Paulo
• October 2019: Accenture acquired Sutter Mills, a French martech and adtech platform consulting and implementation services provider. Headquartered in Paris with an office also in Milan, Sutter Mills’ client base includes companies in the luxury goods, automotive and financial services sectors
• October 2019: Accenture Interactive acquired Bow & Arrow a U.K.- based digital ventures consultancy. Founded in 2009, Bow & Arrow focuses on white space identification: finding opportunities for clients to launch new digital products and services that reinvent customer experiences. The consultancy has worked with clients in a variety of industries but has a particular focus on communications, media and technology.

To drive customer-facing experience consulting work, in collaboration with Accenture Interactive, Accenture has a dedicated Customer Insight & Growth (CI&G) practice focused on driving growth, transforming channel strategies and enabling competitive agility. The CI&G practice teams is one of Accenture's four functional consulting areas which collaborates with teams across Accenture to transform customer experiences and pull in the necessary expertise to deliver full scale CX transformation.

NelsonHall estimates that Accenture Interactive revenues for CY 2018 were ~$7.8bn. Of this, NelsonHall estimates that digital experience consulting services represent ~15% of this (~$1.2bn).

Accenture's digital experience consulting offers services across the full breadth of services to enable customer experience (CX) transformation. This includes addressing both the direct experiences offered and the supporting capabilities necessary to deliver them.

Services offered include:

Business strategy consulting

• Industry and line of business specialization
• CX strategy and vision development
• CX roadmap services
• CX metrix development
• CX analytics
• Organizational & cultural transformation
• Technology transformation.

Accenture has over 40K employees dedicated to customer experience engagements. Of this, ~1.2k globally are designers spanning skills including:

• Content
• Visual
• Motion
• Business design.

NelsonHall estimates that these designers are supported by ~3k UX-UI developers located across delivery locations in Costa Rica, India, and eastern Europe.

Accenture Interactive and UX/CX services are delivered out of ~106 offices globally.

Accenture has been very aggressive in expanding its capabilities in support of creative, digital experience consulting services, acquiring several focused niche firms that provide industry, geography or functional capabilities. This rapid expansion has given Accenture a broad network of design studios, and breadth of skilled employees, though it continues to invest to expand both.

This active acquisition of niche capabilities, tailored to specific geographies, positions it well to understand local culture, client and user needs and provide clients value in tailoring its products to specific target markets.

While the acquisitions have broadened capabilities, it also provides Accenture with the ongoing challenge of incorporating these small, specialist firms into the broader corporate culture. As experience increasingly becomes a core component of broad digital transformation engagements, these new capabilities become increasingly important and the risk of losing key knowledge if people choose not to remain as part of a much bigger organization than the one they joined increases. However, Accenture's history of integrating new acquisitions and its ability to embed these new capabilities into the broader Accenture delivery engine, provide it with the key knowledge, processes and tools to minimize this risk.

As the UX-UI service market continues to evolve from traditional customer-facing web properties to new interaction models, such as voice interactions, AR/VR and experience tailored to machines themselves, Accenture is looking to evolve its own offerings. The globally distributed delivery model that Accenture has built will require specific attention to maintain alignment between design studios and development centers around the globe.