A few weeks ago, I sat on a panel at Execs In The Know’s Customer Response Summit (CRS) in Scottsdale alongside Peter Mallot, General Manager, Worldwide Support at Microsoft, and Lisa Oswald, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Member Services at Travelzoo, and I called for something specific. I said we need to get rid of the word deflection in the way we talk about our work. Not soften it, not rebrand it. Get rid of it. Replace it with a word that describes what we actually want to happen for our customers. Redirection.
The obvious pushback is that this is just a nicer name for the same thing. It isn’t, and the best way I know to show the difference is with “America’s favorite pastime,” baseball.
I know not everyone reading this follows the game, and that’s completely fine. I’m hoping you can follow the play anyway, because you don’t need to know the rules to see the difference between these two swings.
Picture two plays.
A batter squares up, gets just enough wood on the ball, and lifts a soft, arcing pop-up toward short. The shortstop barely has to move. The batter jogs back to the dugout. Nothing was decided, nothing was won. The ball just went somewhere, and the somewhere happened to be out.
Now picture the second batter. Bases loaded, full count, and he drives the ball over the fence in dead center. Four runs score. The stadium is on its feet. Nothing about that swing was accidental. The batter read the pitch, picked his spot, and sent the ball exactly where he intended.
Both are hits. Only one is a strategy.
That’s the difference between deflection and redirection, and it’s a difference our industry has been getting wrong for years.
What the dictionary says we mean
Oxford defines deflection as a sudden change of direction, usually after hitting something. It’s the act of causing something to change direction, often by force, and usually without any intent behind where it ends up. That’s not a customer experience strategy. That’s a customer bouncing off whatever got in their way.
Redirect means something completely different. It means to direct something to a new or different place or purpose. Deliberate. Specific. Aimed. One word describes a collision. The other describes a decision.
Why home runs matter beyond the scoreboard
Here’s what the pop-up and the grand slam don’t share. What happens after.
Nobody remembers the pop-up. Nobody talks about it after the game, nobody rewatches it, nobody buys a jersey because of it. But the grand slam, that’s the highlight reel. That’s the thing fans bring up years later. And here’s the part that matters: the people cheering loudest aren’t always the ones who play the game. They’re the fans. The people who never set foot on the field but who follow the team, wear the gear, and tell their friends to watch next time, purely because winning is worth being associated with.
That’s what a genuinely great customer outcome does. When you deliver the equivalent of a grand slam, solving the problem cleanly, routing someone to exactly the right place, making the hard thing easy, you don’t just satisfy the customer in front of you. You create fans. People who may never buy your product, may never sit in an enterprise contract renewal meeting, but who will talk about you favorably because they watched you win and they liked how it felt.
And fans aren’t only the people buying merch. Some of them are watching from a different seat entirely. They’re deciding whether to invest, whether to partner, whether your organization is one worth being associated with. Retention, valuation, and market reputation all flow from the same thing: a track record of winning outcomes that people notice and talk about. Investors follow performance, and performance is just a string of outcomes, built one redirected, not deflected, interaction at a time. The same thing that turns a customer into an advocate is what turns a company into one worth betting on.
Deflection can’t produce any of that. Deflection, at best, gets someone out of the way. Redirection is how you build a following, the kind that shows up in renewal rates, in referrals, and eventually, in how the market values you.
Where deflection actually came from
None of this is an accident of language. Walk into most boardrooms, and you’ll hear deflection rate talked about as a cost metric. How much volume can we deflect away from the phone, the most expensive channel we operate? It’s a legitimate business problem. But naming the solution deflection gives away the intent. The goal was never framed around the customer’s outcome. It was framed around getting them to stop calling.
That framing quietly devalues everything downstream. The moment the objective is away from us instead of to the right place, you’ve already decided the interaction doesn’t need to be excellent. It just needs to not happen.
Redirection asks a completely different question. Once we understand why someone is reaching out, how do we get them to the right person, the right tool, or the right answer as efficiently as possible, and if we can eliminate the reason for the contact altogether, even better.
That’s not semantics. That’s the difference between an industry that’s actually customer-obsessed and one that just says it is.
If you thought that was a bad word, wait until you hear what we call our own people.
Guest blog post written by Brett Frazer, Group Manager at Intuit and Execs In The Know Advisory Board Member.
This is Part One of The Accountability Gap series. Changing how we talk about customer interactions is a starting point. But what happens when we apply that same scrutiny to the language we use to describe the people responsible for delivering them?
In Part Two, we’ll take a closer look at the words we use for our frontline teams, what they reveal about organizational accountability, and whether our own language would pass the test we expect them to meet.
