What you need to know:

• KPMG has overhauled its CBMA unit into KPMG Customer, and has ambitious growth plans to compete against its consulting rivals. 
• Partner-In-Charge Carmen Bekker says the unit is not yet seeing competition come from agencies and holding companies on CX, design, martech and CRM remits. 
• KPMG Customer has 250 people across six Australian offices after merging its Digital Experience team from the technology practice. 

KPMG has overhauled its old brand, marketing and customer practice to KPMG Customer with ambitious growth plans and a tight focus on client remits where it can own end-to-end CX design, martech and CRM delivery across organisations and then stick around for recurring income from ongoing maintenance, development and upgrades of those investments.

“We’re very ambitious,” KPMG Customer Partner-in-Charge and former JWT and Saatchi & Saatchi exec Carmen Bekker told Mi3. “But ambition doesn’t just come from the numbers. It comes from the type of projects we're doing. The projects that clients are asking us to deliver from strategy through to digital design and delivery and maintenance of digital products and CRM systems - they're the sorts of clients who we want to be working with. For us, ambition wise, it’s more in the desire to work on those end-to-end projects than necessarily the numbers.”

Still, it’s a consulting firm and numbers matter. The overhauled CBMA unit, established in 2017, now has 250 people across six offices and recently integrated the digital experience team from the technology practice, rounding out KPMG Customer’s intent to deliver on big and lasting CX design and implementation programs. Former Virgin Chief Customer Officer Mark Hassell and Zenith and Mediacom exec Karen Halligan are also part of the KPMG Customer leadership group.  

Digital Experience the missing link

“When we started the practice, it was called Customer Brand and Marketing Advisory and we just thought we did brand and marketing advisory,” said KPMG Customer partner Sudeep Gohil, a former Droga5 and Wieden+Kennedy exec. “But the reality of it is, with 250 people across the country, we do a lot more than that so we wanted to make sure the name change was reflective. And the biggest shift that contributed to that name change was our digital experience team. So when they joined our practice, we started to go from doing brand, marketing and some strategy work, and some customer work, to being a genuine end-to-end proposition. And so that was kind of the beginning of our conversation as to why we need to change the name and why we need to reintroduce ourselves to the market.”

While Deloitte Digital, Accenture Song and even parts of CapGemini have substantial investments in creative and campaign capabilities, KPMG is less hellbent on those areas, although in the case of UNSW and others, it does handle the full suite through to creative execution. 

Gohil said the creative unit had doubled in the past year to about 16 people. 

Deloitte Digital completed three acquisitions earlier this year which it said made it Australia’s largest martech and CX firm. But it is also investing heavily into creative and executional capabilities, appointing former Clemenger BBDO CEO Nick Garrett as Deloitte Creative Partner. 

KPMG Customer, meanwhile, is skewing elsewhere. It has created a new practice around Reputation and ESG, now with eight former corporate affairs, government and investor relations and CSR specialists.  

“The reason we did this is because of the deep trend around trust and ESG, leaning into purpose,” Bekker said. “So as we've seen that trend evolve, we've created an area and specialists that can help our clients enable that trend to be realised. Everyone's talking about it. I think there has been a lot of commitments that have been put on the table, big statements that have been made by all sorts of organisations. The big shift that's happening now is customers are now going, 'okay, well, you said you were going to do this. Where's the action?' And so I think we've seen a big shift beyond the commitments and big statements. People are now going, 'well, 2030 is not that far away. How are you going to get there? What are the practical changes that you're making to your organisation?' And it's kind of interesting. The way we want to grow is to keep growing the services that link to what our clients are looking for. So if we're seeing trends in the market, we develop propositions that help enable those to be realised in our customer portfolio.”

Hold co's, agencies not on radar 

Bekker and Gohil say KPMG Customer’s competitive set remains firmly with the big four consulting groups and the likes of Accenture. Bekker said KPMG is not yet running into agency networks and their parent holding companies despite the ambitions from WPP, Publicis and Dentsu to move on the higher growth areas of CX, martech and CRM deployments.

“We work with them, we see them in our clients we work with but we don't see ourselves competing,” she said.

“Probably the bulk of our work is in taking a client from strategy to customer strategy and building out the service blueprint that enables that strategy. And then we see our work move into the various areas of that service blueprint - it might be that they need digital experiences. It might be that they need orchestration of technology across the front office, so CRM systems, martech etc. It might be that they need a reputation, purpose and brand discussion. So we take from corporate strategy or government strategy, institutional strategy into customer strategy. The bulk of our work starts there. It's not the only way into our team but the bulk of our work starts there.”

As for a downturn, Bekker and Gohil think the sort of work KPMG Customer is doing will see it somewhat quarantined, even for creative briefs. 

“The brand and strategy work and the creative stuff that we do, we haven't seen any current slowdown in any of that work,” said Gohil. “And actually I don't anticipate there being a huge slowdown because the focus seems to shift in times like this from ‘let's get some work out there’, to ‘let's get some work out there that actually works’. That's one of the advantages that we have is that when we think about creativity, when we think about a lot of that kind of delivery type work, it comes with all of the kind of legacy KPMG attributes. So when I look at my pipeline, when I look at the conversations we're having, I think the conversation shifts a little bit from perhaps the most creative solution to the most effective solution. And I think that almost kind of plays to our sweet spot a little bit more.”

KPMG Customer is not immune from the talent crunch however, particularly around CX, martech, CRM and broader digital design resource. The firm is looking to its offshoring capabilities in India and Malta, which are being used to fill gaps in client tech resources.

“Like every other sort of technology-based skillset at the moment in Australia, there is a shortage of resource and staff. We are seeing a lot of companies, including ourselves, go offshore for some of that talent to enable clients to either implement or design systems with any specific technology skills that aren't onshore.”