Coincidentally, this week my colleague David Pitre and I had a conversation about the best term to describe what we do. I have long preferred “employee communication” because the focus is on our customer: the employee. David has been hearing lately from professionals who prefer “internal communication” because it describes the universe in which we operate.

But after hanging out in the call center, I’m sure that either term describes the future state. The call center reps aren’t employees; they’re not internal, either (Geographically, they’re hundreds of miles away from the nearest company office.) The reps strongly identify with the client company and with the employees they “meet” on the phone, but they get their paycheck from a different company, their employer. And the reps know they need to be informed—through training and communication—about the client company in order to do their jobs.

I spoke about this conundrum with another colleague, Joe DeLuccia, who pointed out that we have another client who provides healthcare companies with contract sales representatives. Some of these reps are “captive,” working only for one healthcare company, sometimes only on one product. Our client company looks at the challenge of communicating with its reps from a different angle: The reps so identify with their customer that they forget they work for their own company.

Complicated, isn’t it? And pretending that this isn’t our problem—we only have to worry about our real employees—isn’t going to work over the long term.

“Internal communication?” “Employee communication?” Maybe we need a new way to describe what we do.

What do you think?