CX | UX | MR Conference 2023

Patrick Alcantara, Head of Insight, AXA Insurance
Patrick Alcantara is head of insight at AXA, where he looks after customer insight capability across the UK and Ireland. He also worked for well-loved brands such as Co-op Insurance and O2, and was head of research at the Business Continuity Institute (BCI), a global membership organisation. He delivered research on behalf of organisations such as the former UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, BSI, Everbridge, PwC, SAP, Siemens Netherlands, Sungard AS, and Zurich Insurance. He specialises in joining up insights from customer feedback, user experience, and quant/qual research to support customer, commercial, and regulatory outcomes. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Business Continuity and Emergency Planning and the global, multi-disciplinary Future Vision Committee convened by Disaster Recovery International which focuses on operational resilience. He finished a Masters at the Institute of Education (now part of University College London) under an Erasmus Mundus scholarship by the European Commission. He speaks at various conferences in the UK and abroad, and has spoken at the first MRS CX/UX/MR Conference.

Renate Brockes, Customer Insight Lead, Transport for London
Renate has 15 year experience in the insight industry, specialising in the public sector. In her current role, she leads Transport for London’s insight team and has a focus of embedding customer centricity within the organisation. Renate works closely with colleagues across TfL to get to the heart of business issues and design bespoke research studies to provide an evidence base to ensure that customers are at the heart of decision making. Renate has developed strong relationships with several agency partners, working collaboratively to ensure that the insight derived through both tracking and bespoke research studies is engaging, relevant and actionable. 

Nick Campbell, Associate Commercial Director, incling

Melissa Clark, Co-founder and Design Strategy Director, and jump
Reformed management consultant. Melissa is responsible for finding the propositions and experiences that build better futures.
With 10+ years of experience leading projects spanning business, brand, service and technology. She has helped the BBC launch a digital archive for WW2, Lush revolutionise beauty through digital, and Coda create a new digital publishing model.  
Her work has helped people in 30+ countries, achieved commercial returns and being recognised by FastCompany and the Lovie Awards is also a plus.

Neil Costley, Head of Research, Royal London
Neil Costley is Head of Research at Royal London, the UK’s largest mutual insurer.  Neil manages the team responsible for delivering the Group’s research needs across its various audiences – consumer, customer, employer and adviser.  Neil has worked in research for 17 years and before joining Royal London was cofounder of a research agency in Edinburgh working across financial services, FMCG and retail.  

Chaired by Rachel Cope, Director of Client Services, 2CV
Combining insight expertise with customer experience excellence, Rachel’s role at 2CV, a leading global insight agency, ensures that clients have the best possible experience working with team. Rachel uses her many years in the industry to help clients solve their business challenges using insight across a wide range of markets and industry sectors globally.  Designing and advising on the use of customer metrics is a core part of her role in helping clients to improve their customer-centricity.
She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), as well as a certified member of the Market Research Society (CMRS) , and uses her expertise to mentor young researchers, offer training to clients and colleagues, and drive best practice in the industry. 

Emma Dark, Director of Consumer Care UK & IRE, The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.
Emma is a people orientated leader and certified customer experience professional with strong strategic, operational and project delivery expertise. She is a true customer brand ambassador with an in-depth knowledge of customer service excellence.
For the last +20 years, her leadership roles have placed ‘customers at the heart’.  Influencing operating boards representing customers; culturally shifting the mindset within organisations that the responsibility of customers sits across the whole organisation.
A consummate professional, with proven track record of driving successful operational, digital and organisation design changes within medium to large global teams across sectors. Her excellent interpersonal skills and proficiency, bring people together to deliver strongly against key objectives. A passionate pragmatic individual who leads from the front; inspiring others with their entrepreneur spirit taking ideas from vision to reality.  

Nick de Bruxelles, Head of Customer Experience, Cats Protection
Nick is Head of Customer Experience at Cats Protection, the UK’s leading cat welfare charity.
Nick is an established CX and service delivery professional with over 20 years’ experience working within challenging customer focused environments, including the financial and non-profit sectors.
With an interest in human behaviour, Nick’s expertise is the ability to recognise the needs of the customer and translate that into exceptional service delivery. Through this approach he has seen first-hand the advantage that being customer-centric provides to an organisation.
In his current role, Nick provides strategic leadership and direction for the charity’s customer experience, insight and engagement work.
The focus is on driving long-term change that enables the charity to become more customer-centric and therefore better-placed to deliver positive outcomes for cats and their owners.

Sophie Dennis, CX Consultant & Advisor, UK Health Security Agency
Sophie has over 20 years' experience leading strategic service and product design across the NHS and public sector, helping define how we use design to radically improve public services. She has just finished a 2 year stint as Deputy Director for Human-Centred Design & Customer Experience at the UK Health Security Agency, where she built the 120-strong in-house user-centred design capability for NHS Test & Trace from scratch to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. She is chair of the international Service Design in Government conference, and has previously worked for NHS Digital, Department for Work and Pensions, Land Registry, Public Health England, Office for National Statistics and Bristol City Council.

Elle Gallon, Research Director, InSites Consulting
Elle is a Research Director at InSites Consulting, leading the USA and Oral Health Care areas of an ongoing collaboration with Philips. Elle has worked across consumer lifestyle, electronics, wellbeing, and travel throughout her career, and now focuses on developing and delivering a transformative research program to Philips’ global innovation practice. She loves to truly understand humans and what makes us tick. Her aim is to help clients like Philips to keep people, the planet, and rapid forces of change in the world central to their thinking by sharing insights that drive action. Trying new things, delivering energising stories and solving intriguing challenges makes her happy, especially by combining qualitative and quantitative digital research methods to get there!

Dale Gatling, Senior Manager of Consumer & Shopper Insights, Philips North America
Dale Gatling is a senior manager of consumer and shopper insights for Philips North America. During his 8 years with Philips, he has worked on a wide range of brands including Philips Norelco, Philips Sonicare, Avent, and Domestic Appliances. After graduating from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Dale began his research career at Kellogg’s in Battle Creek, Michigan. Over the years, he has worked at several consumer-packaged goods companies such as Kraft and Pepperidge Farm. In his current role at Philips, Dale works with a team of insights and analytics colleagues in North America and globally that develop consumer and shopper insights from multiple primary and secondary data resources. Additionally, he uncovers macro-trends, consumer & shopper behavior trends and determines their impact on consumers, customers, and Philips.

Andrew Gilligan, Head of Research & Insights, City Football Group

Kathryn Gough, VP, Product and Transformation, Allstar 

Chris Hall, Commercial Director, Motif
Chris Hall is Commercial Director at Motif, an insights agency that specialise in building loyalty that better predicts business outcomes for clients. He’s responsible for the continued growth of the business, through uncovering new opportunities with existing clients and new brands. Chris has worked in research and insight for over 20 years in various roles on both client and agency side, and has led customer experience programmes and research for a range of major brands across a variety of sectors.

Louise Hazell, Senior Research Manager, Insites Consulting
Louise Hazell is a Senior Research Manager at InSites Consulting, working with UK clients in the travel and tourism industry. In her 15 years in market research she has worked with a wide variety of brands, using a broad range of methodologies. With all the variety of work, her focus has always been on delivering insights that improve customer experience.
Since joining InSites Consulting, the travel and tourism industry has seen a lot of changes, including technological advancements, adjustments to customer expectations and the need to adapt to global issues such as Covid-19. Whilst challenging, these changes make for an exciting role where she can support her clients through new initiatives that put customers at the heart of business decisions.

Nicole Holt, Head of Research, Beehive
Nicole is Head of Research and Queen Bee at global Insight and CX agency, Beehive Research.
Nicole has over 25 years’ experience of designing, implementing and analysing global research and insight programmes.
She helps brands to understand and engage with their customers and prospects to drive business growth.  Her passion for delivering insight that has the power to help client make informed decision about customer experience is at the heart of what Beehive do.
Nicole’s expertise is in measuring customer experience with a focus on creative solutions, clear communication, pragmatic results and visually engaging strategic presentations providing insights that drive informed decisions.

Lynsey Lorrance, Senior Customer Insights Manager, HelloFresh

Eugene Murphy, CEO, Indeemo

Chris Rain, Co-founder and Creative Director, and jump
Designer first. Passionate believer in uniting research, strategy, design and technology to build better businesses.
Chris loves to ship products. He has been delivering first-class products and services for 15+ years. He creates engaging experiences that connect deeper with an audience and is experienced in leading multi-disciplinary teams across many design processes.
He has extensive experience working with global brands, including the BBC, Virgin Atlantic, Dazn, Google, Barclays, BSkyB and many more. 

Katherine Roe, Senior Insight Manager, Whitbread
Katherine Roe heads up the insight team at Whitbread, a progressive team covering ad-hoc research, analytics and CX. Whitbread brands include Premier Inn, Beefeater, Brewers Fayre, Bar & Block and Whitbread Inns. In the nearly 3 years Katherine has been at Whitbread a lot has happened in hospitality, making it a very exciting sector to work in.
Prior to Whitbread Katherine worked in insight for 18 years, in retail and FMCG. Experience gained from starting off client-side at WHSmith, followed by a long and very enjoyable stretch agency side in data analytics and market research at IRI, then Kantar working closely with and learning from a wide variety of clients such as Kellogg’s, Unilever and Coca-Cola.
Customer Experience is a major focus at Whitbread and Katherine is proud that a lot of progress in insight capability has been made in the last few years and the Customer Experience Framework has been a key part of this.

John Sills, Managing Partner, The Foundation
John Sills is Managing Partner at the customer-led growth company, The Foundation.
25 years ago, he started his career on a market stall in Essex, and since then has worked in and with companies around the world to make things better for customers.
He’s been in front-line teams delivering the experience, innovation teams designing the propositions, and global HQ teams creating the strategy. He's been a bank manager during the financial crisis (not fun), launched a mobile app to millions of people (very fun), and regularly visits strangers’ houses to ask very personal questions (incredible fun).
He now works with companies across industries and around the world, and before joining The Foundation spent twelve years at HSBC, latterly as Head of Customer Innovation.
He regularly writes on Customer Experience and Innovation, and has his first book on the topic being published by Bloomsbury in February 2023.

Krupa Suthar, Research & CX Leader, Insights that Shine

Amy Wilde, Senior Consultant, incling