GE Healthcare Sr. Director On Why Healthcare CX Prioritizes Resolution Over Engagement

In high-pressure service environments like healthcare, the most effective customer experience is built less on connection and more on clarity. For a nurse or clinician on the front lines, where a service call interrupts patient care, scripted empathy takes a backseat to speed and certainty. In a field where every second counts, the customer service leaders that pull ahead are the ones who design interactions that remove friction and help customers get back to the work that matters most.

Burgoyne Hughes is the Senior Director of Customer Service Centers at GE Healthcare, where he leads high-volume service operations supporting clinicians and medical technicians under constant time pressure. At the core of his leadership approach is a simple idea: service works best when it's engineered to make things easier, turning contact centers from cost centers into engines of efficiency and loyalty.

"Making it easy means looking at everything through the customer’s lens and taking away the obstacles that slow them down. That’s the entire focus of what we do in service," says Hughes. His philosophy has its roots in F.W. Woolworth's simple business concept, centered around being a "terrible salesman" and instead making the process easy for people to buy. In his post-sales role at GE Healthcare, "making it easy" takes its meaning from the urgency of the customer’s work. Nurses and clinicians treat service as an interruption, so the model is built around confident resolution rather than artificial connection.

• Solutions, stat: That discipline shows up in deliberate choices, including rejecting common contact center scripts that prioritize engagement over certainty. "When a nurse calls in, they’re not looking for a sense of engagement. They want the issue taken care of, they want to trust it’s handled, and they want to get back to their patients," Hughes explains. The payoff is operational as much as experiential: when customers hang up confident, they don't call back. Eliminating that second call is one of the most effective ways to control cost while improving service quality.

• Bots and bottlenecks: That approach extends to a disciplined technology strategy. Digital and automated experiences earn adoption only if they are clearly better than talking to a human, not simply newer or cheaper. That standard shapes practical decisions, from placing QR codes on equipment that route clinicians straight to the GE HealthCare support homepage to carefully vetting agent-assist tools before rollout. "You have to create an automated experience that is so smooth customers will prefer it over talking to a live person," Hughes says. "We will never force someone down a chatbot or digital path they don’t want. The goal is to make it so easy and comfortable that the customer chooses it."

But a strategy like this only works with a culture built on purpose and confidence. Hughes instills a clear sense of mission in his teams through purpose-driven onboarding centered on "making a difference in moments that matter." In a past e-commerce role, he saw how helping agents understand their purpose—helping customers create a perfect memory for their child's birthday party—directly impacted the bottom line. The investment in longer, more guided calls was justified by tangible results: the average order value was 20% higher than for customers who bought on the web.

• Slow and steady: That culture creates the conditions for a tightly run, cross-functional error review process that turns intent into execution. Each month, leaders from training, instructional design, operations, and partner teams review reported mistakes to identify root causes and focus only on the three issues with the greatest impact, rather than trying to fix everything at once. The result is a sustainable cadence for improvement that steadily removes friction from the system. "When we stopped trying to fix everything and focus on the most frequent and most impactful issues, we drove our error rate from 1.6 percent in 2018 down to 0.04 percent today, effectively driving those errors out of the system," states Hughes.

Customer experience lasts when it's treated as a business driver rather than a feel-good initiative. Leaders who view service only as a cost center overlook its role in reducing friction, preventing repeat work, and reinforcing trust at moments that matter. Hughes argues that when service is designed to deliver clarity and confidence, it becomes part of how the business grows, not a function that sits on the sidelines. "Sales and service are two sides of the same coin. If you’re providing good service, you’re also helping to sell. At the end of the day, providing great service should be helping drive the bottom line," he concludes.