Industry Summary Articles

Accenture has acquired Clearhead, the digital optimization company, based in Austin, Texas, to strengthen the personalization services of Accenture Interactive. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
 
Clearhead helps brands continuously test, redesign and personalize digital customer experiences and digital products to optimize business outcomes. This is becoming a critical capability for companies to compete with digital native businesses that seek to improve every aspect of the customer experience through continuous experimentation and testing.

With a team of more than 70 people, Clearhead enables brands to achieve business outcomes through optimizing key digital marketing, merchandising, sales, and service experiences. Using a proprietary data-driven methodology, Clearhead determines where improving experiences and digital product features may lead to significant gains. It then sets up A/B or multivariate tests to validate these hypotheses, analyzes the results, and redesigns experiences for what works best for customers.

Clearhead has served over two dozen retailers and brands, including a global apparel brand for which it developed and tested simpler ways for users to create an online store account. This resulted in an almost 20% increase in account registration. For a home appliances company, Clearhead developed an online product builder and recommender which is based on data and experimentation and significantly increased order conversion rates on the client’s website.
 
“Experience is the new battleground in the digital world and brands need to continuously optimize it across the entire customer journey,” said Glen Hartman, head of Accenture Interactive North America. “At Accenture Interactive, we’re laser focused on creating the best customer experiences for our clients and we’re excited about Clearhead boosting our personalization business with their experimentation and personalization capabilities.”
 
“Brands are beginning to realize that experimentation is the new normal and has to be core to their culture, capabilities, and operations in order to offer engaging digital experiences,” said Jeriad Zoghby, global personalization lead, Accenture Interactive. “There’s tremendous potential in this market as some clients are looking to increase the tests they run by a factor of ten year over year. Brands are recognizing that this is the only way to compete with the experiences digital native companies provide. With Clearhead’s talent and methodology, we can help brands achieve their ambitious goals.”
 
“Clearhead and Accenture Interactive share the belief that continuous experimentation is key to providing the best digital customer experiences and digital products,” said Matty Wishnow, founder and CEO of Clearhead. “We’re excited about how Accenture Interactive works with clients, using agile tools in a collaborative environment to give them the ability to become more user-focused and nimble. Together, we will scale our optimization capabilities and add more value for brands.”
 
Clearhead’s skills in user experience solutions include Adobe Target, Oracle MaxymiserTM and Monetate. The company is also the reigning Solution Partner of the Year of Optimizely.
 
Headquartered in Austin, Clearhead also has offices in Cincinnati, Ohio and, most recently, London. Clearhead has been named one of the fastest-growing companies in Central Texas for the past two years and one of the best places to work in the region in 2016 by the Austin Business Journal.
 
The acquisition bolsters the full suite of digital customer transformation services Accenture Interactive provides to chief marketing officers and chief digital officers, from creative to technology, spanning experience design, marketing, content and commerce.
 
Clearhead is the fourteenth acquisition Accenture Interactive has made since 2013 to expand the reach, scope, and depth of its end-to-end customer experience services globally. 

To view the original press release, please click here.

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