🧠 TL;DR This Week
Doctor Doom doesn't improvise. Neither should your business continuity plan.
The biggest CX disasters are almost always predictable in hindsight.
A five-minute pre-mortem that actually gets used (unlike the BCP in SharePoint)
💬 The Hot Take
Your BCP was last updated in 2021, has never been stress-tested, and lives in a SharePoint folder nobody remembers. Doctor Doom would be embarrassed for you.
📉 Metric of the Week
Only 23% of contact centers conduct a formal post-incident review after a major service disruption. — Gartner CX Operations Survey
You're learning exclusively from disasters you've already survived. That's a slow way to get smarter.
🎙 From the Queue:
Avengers: Doomsday drops December 18 and it's already shaping up to be the biggest movie of the year. Sorry, Dune fans.
Iron Man renewed my love for Marvel and if you haven't noticed, Marvel is a pretty common theme in what I write. This will definitely not be the last article about Doomsday.
Doctor Doom is the most operationally sophisticated villain in the Marvel universe, and your contact center could learn something from how he thinks. Not the "conquer the world" part. The other part.
Doom plans in layers. He doesn't have a Plan B. He has plans B through G, each triggered by a specific failure condition. In ops terms, that's scenario planning. And it's almost universally skipped.
Where most contact centers fail on risk management:
The BCP exists but has never been practiced. A document that lives on a shared drive and gets dusted off when something breaks isn't a plan. It's a hope. Doom runs war games. Your ops leads should run tabletop scenarios at least quarterly. If your escalation path requires someone to think clearly while everything is on fire, it's already failed.
Technology failures get planned for. People failures don't. What happens when your top team lead quits mid-peak? What happens when your BPO partner has a site outage on a Monday after a long weekend? These scenarios feel uncomfortable to plan for. That's exactly why you should.
Post-incident reviews are blame sessions in disguise. Doom doesn't care whose fault it was. He cares what the failure revealed. Your retrospectives should work the same way. What did we learn? What changes? Who owns the change and by when? If you walk out of a post-mortem without those three answers, you ran a meeting, not a review.
Escalation paths are too complicated to use under pressure. In a crisis, you don't rise to the occasion. You fall to your training. Your escalation matrix should be a laminated card, not a flowchart that requires a calm mind and a working laptop.
Here's where Doom always gets beat: he builds perfect systems that can't absorb chaos. The Avengers don't win because they're smarter. They win because they adapt faster than he expects.
Build the plan. Test it. Break it on purpose. Fix what breaks before it breaks for real.
🛠️ Ops Corner: The Five-Minute Pre-Mortem
Before your next major initiative (new platform, new BPO, new channel launch) run this exercise:
"It's 90 days from now and this went badly. What happened?"
Have everyone write their answer independently before the group discusses
Compile the top three failure modes from the room
Assign a mitigation owner and a deadline to each one
Five minutes of structured pessimism prevents months of reactive firefighting. Doom would approve. He'd also add a trap door to potentially another timeline, but that part's optional.
🙋 One Ask
Who’s the Invisible Woman on your team?
Tag them. Celebrate them. Thank them.
They don’t just make things work—they make them last.
