In Part One, I talked about the panel at CRS Scottsdale and why I think we need to replace deflection with redirection. That one got people nodding. This one, I think, will land harder.
Picture a call.
An agent is mid-conversation with a frustrated customer. Every word is captured—tone, pacing, word choice—and run through an AI model built to score one thing. Did this interaction move the customer closer to a resolution, or further away? Leadership reviews these scores in weekly calibration. Coaching plans get built around them. A single poorly chosen phrase can flag a call for review.
Now picture a leadership meeting one floor up. Someone refers to the contact center team as our captive agents, meaning, simply, the ones who work in-house rather than through an outsourced partner. No one flags it. No one scores it. It’s just what everyone calls them.
One conversation gets held to a rigorous standard for language, tone, and intent. The other doesn’t, even though the second one is talking about people, not to them.
Captive is the second term in this industry that deserves closer scrutiny. Its implications for how we view our people may be even more significant.
What the dictionary says we mean
Captive, according to the dictionary, means kept as a prisoner or confined, unable to escape. Not free to leave a particular place or choose what you want to do. That’s the language of confinement, not employment. Nobody in leadership would put that definition on a slide next to a photo of their contact center team. And yet it’s exactly the word used, casually, constantly, at every level of this industry, purely to distinguish in-house staff from an outsourced vendor.
Compare that to our in-house team. A group of people with complementary skills, collectively accountable for a shared goal. That’s not just a nicer word. It describes a completely different relationship. People who chose to be there, who bring something specific to the table, who succeed or fail together. Captive describes people with no choice in the matter. In-house team describes people invested in an outcome.
It slips out of the best of us
Here’s the part that makes me uncomfortable. This isn’t a problem with leaders who don’t care about their people. I’ve heard captive come out of the mouths of some of the most employee-focused leaders I know and respect. People who will go to the wall for their teams, who talk about culture and care and growth every chance they get. They’ll be mid-sentence, talking about how much they value their in-house agents, and the word just slips out. Our captive team. Our captive sites.
Nobody means anything by it. That’s exactly what worries me. When a word gets so deep into the culture of leadership that it comes out unprompted—even from people who would never knowingly say anything diminishing about their employees—it stops being a slip and starts being a habit. It’s the industry’s default setting. And you can’t fix a default setting by caring more. You have to notice it first.
The standard we already hold ourselves to
Here’s what makes this genuinely hard to defend. We don’t lack the tools to catch this. If an agent used dismissive or diminishing language about a customer, it would show up in a QA score within the week. We built entire systems to make sure the words used about customers reflect the value we claim to place on them.
We never built that system for the words used about our own people.
If leadership language about employees ran through the same model we use to coach agents—scored for intent, for disposition, for the message it sends about how much someone matters—the word captive wouldn’t pass. It reads as confinement. It reads as ownership. It reads as a group of people who work for us because they have no better option, not because they chose to.
That’s not a minor branding issue. Language shapes how people are treated, invested in, and developed. It’s the same argument we make constantly about how agents should talk to customers. If we believe that’s true in one direction, it’s true in the other. The words a company uses about its own people, in rooms those people usually aren’t in, are often the most honest signal of what leadership actually believes.
Two words, one pattern
Deflection reveals how this industry has quietly deprioritized the customer experience it claims to obsess over. Captive reveals how it talks about the people it claims to value most. Neither word was chosen maliciously. That’s almost the point. They became normal because nobody ever stopped to ask what they actually mean.
Customer obsessed. Employee focused. Two phrases we repeat often. Two words, used just as often, that quietly say otherwise.
The fix isn’t complicated. It’s redirection instead of deflection. It’s team instead of captive. It’s simply choosing words that mean what we actually claim to believe. That’s where I left it on stage in Scottsdale, and that’s where I want to leave it here too.
Guest blog post written by Brett Frazer, Group Manager at Intuit and Execs In The Know Advisory Board Member.
This article is the second and final installment of The Accountability Gap, a two-part series examining the language CX leaders use and what it reveals about organizational priorities. In Part One, Brett challenged the industry’s use of deflection and made the case for redirection as a better reflection of the customer outcomes we should be working toward.
Missed Part One? Read The Accountability Gap, Part One: Deflection – Would Our Own Language Pass the Test We Give the Frontline?
