Rick Harris - Managing Director, Customer Faithful 

Rick is a researcher with a passion for customer experience – he spent his early career in retail, selling everything from general merchandise at Woolworths, through to running convenience stores in Australia and bookshops in the UK. But over time, he wanted to understand more about not just what sold, but why it was purchased, and how that knowledge can be so valuable.

For the next ten years, Rick helped businesses and organisations to explore and understand what it’s like to use and buy their goods & services as a customer, and how it feels for those who make or deliver them, as an employee. The goal of his company, Customer Faithful, was to enable organisations to see what mattered most to shoppers and employees, and to be ‘faithful’ to delivering what they needed.

But in 2010, he made a pivot towards healthcare – to take the tools and principles he had learned in researching customer and employee experiences and put them to work exploring the patient experience.

Since then, Rick has built a reputation for uncovering and interpreting the experiences and needs of patients and their caregivers. He has guided some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and bioscience companies to become more ‘patient-centric’ – with the aim of making the improvement of patient experience as accepted and sought-after a goal as clinical outcomes.

His on-going work in therapy areas including cancer, asthma and migraine is breaking new ground in showing how the ‘voice of the patient’ can directly influence the design of treatment and services. 

Rick has also recently become a Public Governor for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) in Cambridgeshire and is a member of The Market Research Society and the Royal Society of Medicine.