CXChronicles Podcast 175 with Deon Nicholas, CEO & Co-Founder at Forethought AI

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #175 we welcomed Deon Nicholas, CEO & Co-Founder at Forethought AI based in San Francisco, CA.

Forethought AI is a Silicon Valley software company founded by a team of Dropbox, Palantir, and Autonomy alumni in 2017. Their mission is to unlock human potential through the power of AI.

Forethought transforms the customer experience by infusing human-centered AI at each stage of the customer support journey. With Forethought, organizations can resolve common cases instantly, predict and prioritize tickets, and assist agents with relevant knowledge—all from one AI platform.

In this episode, Deon and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout his career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked for him across his customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #175 Highlight Reel:**

1.  How AI can transform any company's customer experience  & customer success
2.  Improving how you set priorities + understanding core activities that drive innovation
3. Why customer expectations have changed forever & how your business can adapt
4. Embedding process into your business behaviors and team culture as you scale 
5. Why customer & employee feedback needs to be the  catalyst for driving action

Huge thanks to Deon for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience and customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Deon Nicholas

Click here to learn more about Forethought AI

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, please stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review today. This is the easiest way that we can find new listeners, guests and future business leaders to join our customer focused community!

And be sure to grab a copy of our book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon +  check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see all of our customer focused business leader video content + our past podcast episodes!

Reach out to CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com for more information about how we can help your business make customer happiness a habit!

Transcript

#175 -- Deon Nicholas, CEO @ Forethought AI

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:08) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CXChronicles podcast. Super excited guys. We have Deon Nicholas joining us today. Dan, why don't you say hello to the CX nation? My friend, 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:00:18) - Absolutely. Hello, CX nation. Thanks for having Adrian. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:20) - A hundred percent. So guys Deon got a super cool story that he's going to share with us today. Um, Deon, the CEO of Forethought, and this is a super cool customer experience AI company that is doing a whole bunch of fun things in our space. And Deon, you've got a bunch of listeners today who love this stuff, man, just like me and you, man. They're thinking about the thing about customer experience, customer success. They're thinking about retention. They're thinking about upselling cross-selling. So you came to the right place. My friend, 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:00:44) - Absolutely looking forward to it. Why 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:46) - Don't you, why don't you start off? Uh, let me start off all the episodes. Deon, take a couple of minutes, man. Tell us your story. How did you get into this space? Um, how did you kind of get, get, get, get stuck into the world of customer experience and customer success and then definitely. How did you come up with this idea for thought, man? And how did you put together that building team that's that's doing this incredible work that the forethought team is doing today? 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:01:07) - Yes, sir. So, um, I was born and raised in Toronto, inner city, Toronto low-income family. Um, I was at a young age. I, I learned to code and coding became this passion of mine and, and the thing that I always followed, uh, throughout the rest of my life, um, my first ever job in high school, um, was in customer service. I was stocking shelves at shopper's drug Mart, which is a Canadian CVS for folks who don't know answering customer calls, answering customer questions on the floor. And even at that time, I always kind of had this realization that I don't always have all the answers to my customer questions and customers don't always have all the information they need to, uh, get their problem solved or to figure out things about, you know, whether it was the pharmacy or the, the, the products. Right. Um, and so over my, my life, I I'd always thought about how can technology and coding, which is something that I started learning about and loving, um, be used to help people get their most important questions answered. Um, eventually went off and became a software engineer, um, moved out to, I live in Silicon valley now and in Millbrae California. Um, and 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:02:17) - The Toronto Deanna. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:02:19) - Exactly, exactly. We don't, we don't have, uh, the, the drastic park, uh, when it comes to NBA finals, but we've, we've got the warriors. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:02:27) - I like you, man. Congrats by the way. Huge win this week. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:02:30) - Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I can, um, as a Toronto native, I don't know if I can like, you know, pay that I'm technically a bay area person now w we'll see, but absolutely great when, um, and so I feel products and infrastructure companies like Facebook, uh, Dropbox Palentier, but every single time when I was ramping up on new projects, I was realized that, you know, again, I don't always have all the information I need. Um, and it's, it's either buried across, uh, or scattered across silos are trapped in people's heads. And so I kept coming back to this idea of how can AI really help people get their most important questions answered eventually, um, started forethought. We launched in 2018, a tech crunch disrupt, which was super exciting. I'm really on this mission to use human centered AI, to transform the customer service experience and beyond. So that's kind of how that came about. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:03:19) - I love him as a number one, super cool background. Super cool story. Um, before we even dive into the pillars, man, what, what were some of the things you just mentioned? Some, some, some pretty incredible companies, right? Like when you're looking at companies like Facebook and you're looking at companies like lb and tar and Dropbox, there, must've been some really incredible things that you started to see early on, or that you were finding early on that, um, kind of started jumping out at you. What were some of those big, what were some of those big items? What were some of the big things that you were looking? 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:03:49) - Absolutely. So some of the big things that I've seen, well, one, uh, in every case, it takes a technological innovation, um, you know, thinking outside the box on taking new technology and bringing that to people. And then the second thing that I've always seen in, in all of these companies that end up being successful is a focus on, uh, a hyper focus on bringing on the right talent very early on. Um, and, and just really focusing on people, whether that's in engineering or in product or in sales or in customer experience, excuse me. At the end of the day, it ends up being about all about people and building the right kind of culture to enable those people to thrive. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:04:26) - I love them. And I'm glad that you bring that up because even for an awesome product leader, the puke peep at the end of the day, guys, people, people are the ones that make these decisions. People are the ones that use these tools. People are the ones that will figure out whether or not a solution or a set of solutions does or does not work. So I love that. That's super cool. Why don't we dive into, uh, into forethought, man, I'm pumped to kind of get into the, into the weeds in this. Why don't you take a couple of minutes at the end, give us a sense for how you've gone about building the forethought team. What are some of the different teams or roles or departments that are really kind of building some of the solutions and building some of the, um, some of the, some of the products that you guys are putting the market today.

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:05:01) - And absolutely. So at forethought, we build what we like to call human centered AI. So AI that's embedded into the customer service experience and really brings intelligence across the entire life cycle of the support inquiry. Um, a lot of people, when they think about artificial intelligence, the first thing they think about is deflecting customers. Yeah. We actually like to think, think beyond that one, can you solve customer's problems in a self-service fashion if you can't, how do you make sure it gets to the right human and the right channel at the right time? Because oftentimes human agents are again, um, the most important part of the stack. And so we will triage route tag, categorize, classify issues, think about sentiment, send it to the right agent. And then we will assist those agents, um, with the problems by providing suggested answers, search resources, and so on. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:05:48) - And so these are actually distinct products and modules. And so you can kind of see on our website solve triaging system or launching some other products as well. Um, but again, it really does follow that life cycle of the customer service inquiry, um, in terms of the teams, um, and how we think about it. Uh, we really actually started with just a single product, a single, um, module, and then we've grown that, that product over time and to becoming this, um, human centered AI platform. Um, and so doubling down on, uh, product teams engineering, uh, we have an amazing machine learning and research team, um, from places like, um, apple, Columbia, um, Google, Facebook, so on. And, and then not only do we think about the technology and the research, but as I said, it's about bringing that technology to the people. So, uh, many, many folks who work with the forethought team rave about our customer success team. And, and so we've actually kind of built customer experience into the way that we do business, right? And so, um, it's kind of one of our values and putting customers first. And so definitely a lot of great for thinkers as we call ourselves a lot of great forward-thinkers, um, doing a lot of great work in order to bring our solutions to the market. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:06:56) - I love that, man. I think, you know, as many of our listeners probably are thinking right now, you know, one part of incredible customer experience, customer success, customer support, uh, client services, it's oftentimes it's managing, it's managing inbound inquiries, it's managing amount issues. It's managing different requests, different feature sets, all these different things. And for the longest time, and there's been so many different software companies that focused on the mechanics of ticketing, right? You've got some, some of the, some of the OGs like Zen desk and, um, and FreshWorks, and now even up-and-comers like customer, there's all these tools that have been built around how to actually pay a per ticket document the case, add a bunch of information, maybe tag some visibility. But what I love about what you and the forethought team are doing in this idea of like the, like the forethought viewers, you're looking on the horizon for people, it took a while, man, to get companies like forethought to come along to say, wait a minute, there's a tremendous amount of gold in a lot of these tickets, there's a ton of information. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:07:54) - There's a tremendous amount of data. Let's think about how we can help humans with prioritization, severity definitions. Also I'm thinking man, from our conversation the other day, even just like helping people see a couple steps ahead when there might be an actual item, it's a leading indicator for term or a leading indicator for disruption or a leading indicator for some customer or some point of contact, maybe feeling a little bit of consternation with your product or your service or your team. So love that you guys knew that that was a big space. I think the other big thing is this man, Dan, it's like as so many, um, different companies grow and as they scale and as they get bigger and as their, their customer base get more complex, any help that you can get keeping track of all this stuff is like doors are wide open, man, come on in and help us. Because as many of our listeners know this stuff is hard. It's hard triaging on it. It's really hard to keeping track of it. And any type of additional, uh, technology or a based support is going to be super, super, uh, wanted and needed in today's world. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:08:51) - Absolutely. I love how you put that. And, and so one of the things you talked about is this kind of shift in migration from, I would say over, you know, the, the 2010s, the big shift was the movement to the cloud. And then the building of these systems of record in kind of SAS in cloud, you can think of businesses like Salesforce, or even, you know, Dropbox or wherever. These were all businesses that, that took the system of record into the cloud. Um, and now what we're seeing is with the rise of artificial intelligence, you're starting to see the rise of the system of intelligence, right? So how do you take all that information that's coming from the CRM and then use that to empower and power up your, your business, whether that's into the customer support or customer experience, world sales, it service management beyond, we're starting to see a big wave of not just, okay, how do we bring things to SAS, to the cloud, but how do we make everything more entirely.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:09:46) - I love that. And honestly, that's, that's the name of the game we're living in a, in a world and we're living in a marketplace data where customers have super lofty expectations and they should, we've got, we do some of the companies that, your name, and we've had some incredible world changing businesses in front of us over the last 10 years. So consumers, both on the B2B and the BDC side, they've got a wildly different set of expectations for how delivery happens, how, um, we're able to remediate things even just the time. Right? Do you have people want stuff now? Like Amazon, we could think Mr. Bezos and Amazon for that, but people want stuff now, regardless if it's a, uh, a cloud-based solution, whether it's a Willy or where it's a physical, tangible product to the world, that's just what people expect, man. So I love it. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:10:26) - Dan, I'd love to, I'd love to jump into the second CX pillar of tools. Um, let me break this up into two parts where you're number one. I want you to definitely continue to kind of give our listeners some ideas for some of the amazing things that the forethought tool can do, but as you're building the business, as you were building your team, and certainly as you were building like that, that early customer portfolio, right. When you're getting a bunch of really cool companies to come on board, and you're trying to figure out how you can help them, what were some of the tools that you guys had to use, or what were some of the, what were some of the leading technology solutions that you and your team were really kind of leveraging to allow that growth to happen until some of that scale to come into play? 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:11:02) - Absolutely. It's, it's pretty interesting and kind of, um, humbling and in many senses that a lot of SAS business is, is about kind of like just figuring it out. Right. And so a lot of my friends who ask like, Hey Dion, like how would I come up with a startup idea? A lot of times I'll tell them, go and work for a SAS startup right now, any department. And you're probably gonna find the tech stack is completely broken there. You could probably start a billion dollar business around that. Right. And so it, and I hadn't realized that until I started the company. Right. But even down to, um, so some of our tools kind of like internally, when I think about being a CEO, like in the early days, it was Gusto and, and Brex and little things to manage payroll and finances and expenses. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:11:48) - And then eventually you start thinking about, um, you know, scaling your team. Right. And actually a lot of it is actually about scaling your team planning, managing, um, and stuff like that. So those are some of the tools I remember we used. Um, but then you start getting more sophisticated around your go-to market, around your product. Right. I actually probably product first. Right. So you start leveraging tools today. We use things like amplitude in order to get analytics, um, Tableau across the board. Um, and then on the go-to-market side, obviously we talked a little bit about Salesforce systems of record, stuff like that. Um, and then outreach. So, I mean, I could go on and on, but it's just interesting when you think about like building a world-class company, every single area of the business kind of has that tech stack and also that kind of, that evolution in that growth. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:12:34) - Um, and I actually think there's, there's, there's lots of, um, billion dollar businesses waiting to be born even, even today. Um, and then on the forethought side, obviously, as, as we've already, we started by thinking about human first, right? So we started with our assist product and then over time we actually scaled that and we said, okay, well, how do we make sure tickets get to the right agent at the right time? So then we launched our triaged product and it was actually in 2020 in response to the pandemic when we started to see a ton of companies that were seeing a ton of support volume, right? So imagine how many flights had to get canceled. How many people were asking questions of their banks are asking about PPP loans that saw a spike in support volume, and at the same time, because of work from home orders and the whole pandemic, we saw a drop in productivity as people were shifting and adapting to working from home and this new digital landscape. And so, um, we actually launched our solve product at the, um, basically the peak of the pandemic in order to help a lot of these problems. And so it's been interesting to see our own platform, our own tech stack evolve, and it's starting to become the de facto standard, um, in, in customer support automation and AI. Um, and so that's been a really humbling experience as well. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:13:46) - You know, you know, I'm glad you brought up the solve apart department because I think this is, this is an important one, like many of our listeners they're, they're, they're, they're leading CX and CS efforts at a, at a, at a bunch of awesome, you know, up and coming companies. It will be tomorrow's, you know, future business leaders. Right. But when you talk about the solving piece and you talk about how to help those folks with leveraging some of the, some of the existing data sets that they've already gotten, or to your point, a lot of these companies, especially let's call it what it is, guys, a lot of these venture capital backed startup growth companies, they don't necessarily always build in a, in a singular type of view where everybody can see everything. As you mentioned, once you start getting to the point where you start bringing on heads of marketing heads of CX heads, of sales and revenue, it's very common for people to have their specific tools or their specific data sets, or they build inside of their silos. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:14:30) - One of the things I love about what you just mentioned about the forethought salt, um, feature those, like there it's wild Dan, how long it can take certain really intelligent companies and intelligent leadership teams to leverage that data, leverage your past mistakes, man, more than anything, like think about it. Like some of these companies that have thousands or tens of thousands of tickets and no one's ever done a review in terms of like some of the, the, the, the gold that's sitting there waiting to get brought back to product or waiting to get brought back to sales and marketing, we're waiting for it, even for the, uh, the success side, right. Just making sure that people feel really, really comfortable answering the top five things that most customers are going to ask you anyway, that must have been, um, that must have been a game changer for the business, but it must have also helped a lot of the early customers that you guys were working with at forethought must have really helped them to see the value of the time to value for a tool like forethought much quicker, much easier, right. In front of your face. Well, what was that kind of like in the beginning with when you really started having some of your first examples of like guys we're showing what the value is, we're showing you how we're changing your business and we're showing how we're a strategic partner in your own growth plan. What would that, what was that period like for you guys? 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:15:39) - Yeah, so we're, we're in a really interesting market because we're in this market where a lot of there was a wave of legacy technologies, chatbots, and things like that, that all use the moniker AI. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:15:51) - Right. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:15:51) - Um, and we all know that, um, your classical chatbots are not AI. They're the rules-based they're decision tree based. You literally hard code. If I see the word refund, go and issue a refund. But when the customer says, Hey, my package wasn't delivered. I just want my money back. You don't see that refund keyword anywhere. The box is going to be like, I don't know. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:16:11) - And, 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:16:13) - And we get that confusion, that frustration. And, and so the, the, we were, we were actually in a market where the value proposition was not new and was not unknown. So we didn't have to educate the market on that. Everyone knew that they needed automation, they needed to leverage their technology, um, or sorry, their, their data. So we were in a market where people didn't know how they had everything they had tried in the past didn't work because it wasn't actually real AI. It was, I like to say an artificial intelligence, those are a lot more artificial than intelligent. Right. And so, um, so being able to deliver value and show our value prop and actually really boiled down to saying what you mean and doing what you say, right. So actually being able to say, here's the ROI we think we can give you and then going and hitting that and exceeding that. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:17:01) - And that was really what we had to do to build that credibility with our customers just in the early days, don't over promise, here's the product, here's what we can do, leverage your data. And here's some actual questions that you're seeing answered by the system. And then over time that, that, that really grew. Um, and so we've been able to leverage a lot of that data and turn that into insights, right? Turn that into answers for customers and turn that into resources for agents. Um, and now, uh, we've kind of built that credibility where customers, you know, they're starting to know, like, I am not going to run a scaling support org without something like 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:17:36) - Yeah. A hundred percent. Yep. It's become a, it's become almost a, a major part of every CX and CS leaders arsenal. The other thing too is you just mentioned the scalp park Dion, right? It's like, if you want to know one of the easiest ways that you're going to be able to sort of ease your scaling pains or your scaling woes, you're going to have to leverage the right types of tools and the right type of technology to be able to get you to that next stage. So I love that. I love that. You're calling that out some awesome points here. Dan, I'd love to pick your, pick your brain a little bit on the third CX pillar of process, man. And I I've, I'm going to enjoy this well, because I think the whole world, all of us know last three years, man, with the move that with the, with just everybody getting shoved into this new remote work management and hybrid work management type of world, which is awesome. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:18:18) - I think many of us are happy. I know a lot of us are still happy to get back to you and that's fantastic, but that's also the beauty of the hybrid world is that people are going to have different working styles and different working preferences, just like our customers, right? Just like every single customer has got a different set of styles. I'd love to hear how you and your team at forethought has thought about process, especially as you grow as you've grown. Because I think the one thing that I'm starting to hear more and more and more with some of our awesome guests in the show is like a, every business has a totally different evolutionary path towards how they manage process, how they build playbooks, how do they keep playbooks up to date, or how do they keep them living and breathing so that they're constantly being updated. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:18:55) - And there it's like the realest freshest version of your, of your FAQ's or your knowledge base or your, your standard operating procedures. But I'd love for you to spend a couple of minutes kind of hugging the team of forethought, sort of tackled the evolution of those playbooks and how have you kind of wrangled, uh, cause this is a complex world, man, and you guys have a lot of different types of customers. So I imagine managing and wrangling process for you guys was a bit of an interesting feat, but I'd love to hear what some of the things that you guys did to, to manage that. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:19:23) - Absolutely. So the interesting thing about processes that processes is, is sometimes a catch all term because there's, I would argue three, like many parts to this process loop. One is culture, right? Oftentimes process is put into place because you're actually trying to enforce a culture. And, and so the actual better way to do that. And quite frankly, no process is gonna work until you do the following, which is embedded into your behaviors. Right? And so the first thing you gotta be thinking about what is the behaviors or the patterns of behavior that we want to see in this, in this function, it can be about.

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:20:00) - You interact with your team and your employees and so on, it can be about how you interact with your customers. It can be about standard operating procedures for, you know, how you sell or whatever. Any part of the business is going to have the culture that you're trying to create, or the behaviors that you're trying to see replicated. And I think it actually starts by doing those things, even before you think about what is the process you think about, what are the things that I got to do regularly? And in order to get that done, then step two is I would say documentation, right? And so one of the things that the biggest missing steps and we, you know, we definitely went through this throughout all of our growing pains is not writing it down. And so I can think about, um, when I think about company culture and like, as we scaled from, um, about 24 thinkers to, uh, over 104 thinkers in, in about a year's time span throughout the pandemic, one of the things I realized was, Hey, if we want to figure out what are the processes that we're going to need, and what's the culture we want to build, we've got to start writing it down. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:20:55) - What are the values, the operating principles, what are the things that we actually do want to see and literally making that explicit and teaching people and then repeating. And so it was like this process of what is the culture you want to build? What is the process, um, uh, or what is, uh, the documentation? And then the third is I would actually argue, and this is probably good for any scaling business, invest in ops, whatever ops means, every single function has a version of that ops. So when you think about you're building out your sales team, what is your sales ops team or your revenue ops team looking like, as you're thinking about building out your product, what is your product ops team? And oftentimes it's not, you know, a giant 10 or 15 person team. It could be one person and maybe it's one person across many different fields, but if you don't have somebody who's monitoring the process, improving the process and then building out the tools necessary, you're actually going to find that oftentimes that process goes by the wayside. And so that's when those are probably the ways I would say you can leverage and start investing in building out your process. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:21:49) - I love that Dean. Awesome points there, man. I think the first one about just this idea of like, almost like this culture led idea around process curation, process optimization and process ownership, brilliant men for definitely first time, I've heard a guest say it that way, because I think you're right. If, if you're not working in a, in an environment or an organization or an ecosystem where the actual culture drives the importance and drives why it's so critical and so imperative that then, and then enter your second part here while you're documenting telling the story, recording the story on a regular basis. I think the other thing too, for folks like us and for most of the listeners on the show, especially when you're a growth focus company guys, when like you've just figured out how to go to market, you've just wrangled up your first hundred or a thousand customers. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:22:33) - Like you've just figured out how to go from 24 thinkers to 104 thinkers, like more than ever your ability to capture, curate and refine incredible content, right? Whether it's written, whether it's audio, whether it's video based. And by the way, this is another thing that Dean that you're making me think about. I love that you bring this up is like guys, your culture can, can, can, can embed all of those different things. So if you're not a writing culture and you're a video culture, awesome, use a Loomer, a vineyard or a zoom, and make sure that all of your primary storytellers are primary thinkers or your executive thinkers are telling their stories with video. If you're a writing culture, awesome. To have a bunch of shared docs for your, where you're, everybody's adding to the story coauthoring, some of these processes go offerings of these steps and then audio selfishly for me being a podcast idea. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:23:17) - And you can imagine I push a lot of our clients that at CXC to make sure that they're using the power of, of your, of your voice, man, the power of your audio messages, audio notes. So many of us this day and age are we're on the we're on our computer screens and we're in or out of our pocket on mobile. So often that audio has become so easy for us, right? Podcasts, audio, books, music, all these different ways. So you can kind of multitask, but I love that idea, man. I think it's, I think it's really important. One, one last question, before we jump off her process during your time building forethought, did you guys have to night, um, like a handful of owners or I know it's a part of the culture and obviously you got better at the documentation part, but did you have, was there people that own, this was it leadership team's job to own a who, who did you guys sort of, uh, nominate as the, as the guy or the gal that was really going to own some of these different steps that we're talking about right here? 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:24:07) - Yeah. Great, great question. Um, and I've, I've been thinking about this and reflecting on this lately, just as I've grown as a leader, um, one of the things that I'm seeing, great leaders, great companies do at any point in time, if you don't have a directly responsible individual accountable individual, one person, can't be, can't be three, exactly. One person for any one thing it's not going to happen. And it's weird to, you know, it happens by osmosis. No, this just doesn't happen. So usually what that means is actually two things. One narrow, the scope is kind of the, the quote that I've heard a lot, which means don't try and do 10 different things. But what are the one, what is the one, two, maybe three things that you need maybe three that you need to get done. Ideally it's one, right? And so that's what you need to do. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:24:53) - And then similarly have exactly one person responsible for that. That should be their OKR, their objective and key result. That should be how the, what they're compensated on. If you do bonuses, things like that. And, and it's, it's kind of, that's, that's how things are built. You know, one step at a time, things are built by people. Um, and so if you have multiple people in charge of it, you're, you're never going to do it. And that's not, not to say you need like an entire person owning everything, but on anything, there definitely needs to be that one person owning that thing. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:25:24) - Yep. I think that's huge, man. I think so many of us have heard this idea of like.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:25:28) - Uh, using it, whether it's a RACI model or whether some type of accountability model, but like even understanding the, the responsible party versus who's simply being informed versus who's being consulted or who needs to just be aware that the thing is even happening in the first place, but you're right, man, having that delegation point or that owner or that responsible party, oftentimes it can, it can smooth a lot of the downstream consternation right there both internally and externally. So I love that awesome ideas or Deanna Deanna loves to jump into the, the fourth CX pillar of feedback then. And this one I want to spend, so spend a little extra time on, because I was excited just as a CX nerd, myself, to chat with you about this today, but like a big part of what your tool does being part of what forethought does. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:26:07) - It's, it's, it's, it's unearthed, unearthing and understanding feedback, but then the other big part of it, it's what you just mentioned a couple of minutes ago, helping to push action drive action like that. We talk about this constantly shovel. There's so many tools out there that do the collection part. They can help a company or help a group of thinkers collect feedback. There's not enough tools like forethought, where they're helping to drive action or, or give you some type of advantage around which, which actions to maybe prioritize or which actions to start with. So let's break this into two parts. I'd love for you to spend a couple minutes talking about how you and the team of forethought had really kind of gone about collecting, leveraging and acting upon your customer feedback. And then I'd love to hear you talk for a minute or two about how you've been able to do the same thing with your team as the forethought team has grown and how you guys leveraged some of your employee feedback. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:26:56) - Absolutely. Um, I, I'm going to start with maybe a broad, broader variant of that, that possibly covers both, but more of a philosophy of, um, uh, there's this book by Daniel Kahneman dental appointment is this I'm Nobel prize, winning economist. I mean, he writes a lot about, uh, how the brain works and the book is called thinking fast and slow. It's one of my favorite books on making and it talks about, um, basically how people can make snap judgements. That's your fast thinking processes. Um, and it's usually driven by or built on intuition. And then at the same time, there's like these, a lot of anecdotes around how that can go wrong. And when that can go well, and then there's, uh, your brain also has slow thinking. That's when you actually stop. And you're like, I'm not gonna make a judgment, a quick judgment. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:27:42) - I'm going to process something and then work through and come to a decision. And you often come to very different decisions. So slow thinking is a more accurate, but it just takes a longer time. And like 90% of the decisions you need to make, you can actually make the snap judgements. And one of the things they talk about in that book is that the only thing that can make your fast thinking better and more accurate is expertise is spending time training your intuition. Um, and they give this example like a firefighter when they enter a house, they can immediately know where the fire is. Right. Um, and, and so the reason that comes to mind is I think that's actually the core of why feedback is so important because every single day, we're making snap decisions, snap judgements that we're going to be wrong about a lot. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:28:27) - Um, but we need to be able to train our intuition and you do that through looking at the data every single day, right? So pulling in dashboards, pulling in whether it's customer feedback, having some kind of literal visual way to map out that data, we'll train your intuition. Um, and then you use qualitative feedback, survey your customers, talk to your customers, um, spend a lot of time, do ride alongs. We did a lot of that in the very early days of building our products, um, to get you that, that slow thinking feedback, right? So that you can kind of ponder and understand what's going on. And, and, and, and those two feedback loops, um, you know, data quantitative qualitative that can kind of feed that. Okay. I need to make a snap judgment versus I need to dive deeper. That's actually how I think about problem solving in general. And I think it applies in both cases and that's the kind of thing that, um, we would like to build. And we were trying to build that at forethought. It for our team is being able to create these feedback loops so that we can make these decisions, but still move rapidly. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:29:24) - I love that, man. So first of all, I love, I just love this notion in general of like, you're quick, you're quick thinking. And then your deep thoughts, right? The other thing too, is I'm just thinking of hearing you give us that example. It makes me think about so many different times in, in, in my own career where there was times where you could literally tell certain executives were almost purposely doing, uh, doing the, the slow thought or the deep thought, because to do a rapid thought in a situation like that there could be risk, or there could be, you could potentially cause some disruption in not a good type of way that we normally use that term. But on a fast thinking, I'm thinking about some of the busiest, craziest, um, CX or call center teams that I've ever seen in my career. And some of those leaders ability to do almost like where the 20% of the things that are happening in 80% of the times, they build that fast thinking intuition, almost reactive 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:30:16) - Type 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:30:16) - Of 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:30:16) - State, which is 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:30:17) - Typically what helps to push along growth or push along the east of scale, or again, even just being able to create economies of scale with the team or with the call center team or with a, with a set of tools to be able to do that. So love that idea. Um, what, when you, one of the things I want to ask you some questions on though, with the ride along Dan, you might've just made, made a call out here in the feedback part of the show that I think every one of our listeners, if you're not doing your form of a ride along, um, you need to be doing it right now. When did you guys start doing ride alongs? Was it primarily in the very beginning when you were iterating on the, the, the, the beginning of the forethought tool? Was it when you had already found that, that, that, that, that product market fit, and you already had a handful of customers? What did you really start leveraging the power of the, of the ride along.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:31:01) - Totally agree. That's one of my favorite parts of being a part of the CX or CS team is like, this is where you can build relationships with customers and users, and you can get like intimate awareness or feedback, or not just like what NPS and C sat and customer effort score surveys give you. But like you can get just absolute goals from, from your users. What time did you guys start introducing that into the, the evolution, the forethought growth 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:31:26) - Day one day zero, actually. Yeah. Um, so when, uh, my co-founder and I started building out the initial forethought product, the first thing we had to do is figure out whether there was some technological risks. So we have to build out some models and see if there was even something we could build that could understand the data like we needed it to. And so we spent a few months, uh, doing that, but the moment we were we're convinced that, um, the technology could work. We, we immediately switched to spending as much time as humanly possible with customers. And then we like to say, we just stop writing code. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:31:57) - You know what I mean? Um, and so spend time with our customers because it wasn't going to matter unless we had, you know, early pilot customers, it wasn't gonna matter unless we had design partners in there with us. And so we just spent time literally scouring our network, trying to find, uh, support leaders who would talk to us and not pitching them a product. We actually had a demo of our, our, our AI. It was like a little command line prompt so that they could see kind of the, the ideas behind it. But beyond that, um, we just sat with the, the directors. We asked to sit with their agency, how they're working, not even with our tool or anything like that, but just in their day-to-day systems. And then as we started building more, we would ship products and then ask for feedback, do the little ride alongs or the zoom sessions or whatever. And, um, as we got bigger, so one, I would actually attribute that to being one of the cores to that early success in finding products. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:32:49) - And then as we got bigger, I would argue, this is again, one of those cultural things where it's actually gets a lot harder to, to eat your, you know, your nutrients, your vegetables, right? And so that's something every single person needs to be doing. Um, but at the same time, as you get bigger as an organization, and Nosha kind of pushes you away from doing what you're doing. So that goes back to that process, that culture, how do we build a culture where everyone is talking to customers, where everyone is, uh, putting customers first, so to speak, um, and it's easier said than done, but it's, it's one of those things where you have to build a culture and build a process around. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:33:21) - I love it, man. I absolutely think that's such such sound wisdom. And I think, you know, again, for our listeners come up with your own form of a ride along today, right? The second you're probably already doing some form of it's so awesome to the folks that are, and you better be. But I'm saying for folks that aren't, there's so many people out there deep thinking about showing startup founders, so many, so many startups, CX and CS executives are constantly thinking about how am I going to drum up more feedback? How am I going to create more meaningful data to dump into a VOC report? How am I going to figure out how to manage up to the executive leadership team? The next hundred pieces start with ride alongs. Because again, it's like number one, you'll figure out how to get better at some of the qualitative counting measurement. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:33:59) - And by having those conversations and then number two to Deon's point, what, what, what, what, what takes the cake is when you have the quantitative and the qualitative together, you've got some of the data, some of the numbers, some of the measurement, but then you have stories. And some of those stories are literally where you can get super smart people across the room, across the aisle, across the entire business to start agreeing upon some of the things that are absolutely mandatory to create know phenomenal customer experience and customer success. So I love that. And those are awesome ideas. Um, w before we wrap up, today's show my friend. I want to make sure, spend a couple minutes talking about some of the, um, anything that you want to call out the you and the forethought team are working on any upcoming events, any, anything like that. And then certainly where can people find out more about you, sir? And where can people find out more about your team? 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:34:44) - Absolutely. So, um, if you want to learn more about forethought, go to www.forethought.ai, um, I'm available on all of the social. So LinkedIn, um, Twitter, um, all the above I am at doji boy, 90 O J I B O Y nine. Don't ask about my Twitter handle. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:35:01) - Is there a story behind, there is 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:35:02) - A story, there's a story you want. I can give you the story 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:35:05) - Story on that bed. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:35:07) - Oh my gosh. I'm going to change my Twitter handle one day and this is going to never again, but, um, when I was a kid, so I mentioned, I learned to code at a young age, um, reasonably young and I was super into Pokemon. And did you mind, and I had this idea that I was gonna make a video game. Um, and, and so, and I was going to call it doji mode. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:35:25) - It was like this great idea. Um, just combined it at anyway. Um, and, uh, that, that phrase doji kind of stuck with me. It doesn't mean anything now, but it kind of has symbolized in any like idea I had when I was a kid. Like I had these other video game ideas and stuff like that. And that's how I learned to code was through figuring out how to, how to make video games. And, um, anyway, so that word kind of symbolizes for me learning how to code that whole journey and that whole experience. And so I've kind of kept it. It's kind of in the silly thing. And it's, you know, it's one of those, like, you make your, your Twitter handle when you're like, I don't know, however old I was, and I've just never changed it. That's, that's the story. That's the story behind my Twitter handle. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:36:09) - I love it. We'll look DN. Number one. Huge. Thank you for you coming on the cxchronicles podcast and sharing your story, love the things that you and the team are doing at forethought. Um, our absolute pleasure, man, and we're looking, we're going to look forward to seeing what you and the team do next. 

Deon Nicholas, Forethought AI (00:36:20) - Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Adrian. Cheers.