Watchlist

Most CX dashboards give you forty things and ask you to find the signal. The Watchlist is the opposite: a curated set that Forepost has decided is worth watching. The discipline of narrow attention is the product.

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The eight live metrics

These are the numbers you enter (or import). Every Daily Brief flows from them.

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The four derived signals

These Forepost computes for you, no input required.

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Industry benchmarks

Every Watchlist card includes a small band line (“above median · p50 85%”) under the metric. Forepost compares your numbers against current public reports (Intercom 2026, Zendesk CX Trends 2026, Zendesk QA / Klaus, HubSpot, Lorikeet, SurveySparrow, Contentsquare) — full source list, percentile tables, and refresh date in Industry benchmarks. The Daily Brief uses the same bands to call out where you actually stand (“CSAT 87% sits above the SaaS median; AI deflection 30% is bottom-quartile, that’s the lever this week”). When public benchmarks aren’t available for a metric (volume, open tickets, utilisation), Forepost stays silent rather than inventing a comparison.

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Setting targets

Every metric on the Watchlist (except the demand-driven ones — weekly volume and open-now) accepts an optional target you set in Settings → Metrics → Targets. Once set, three things change:

1. The card gets a small “Target X” indicator below the industry benchmark line, coloured green when you’ve hit it and amber when you haven’t.
2. The Daily Brief and Weekly Watch prose lead with distance-to-goal in plain numbers — “CSAT is 78% against your 85% target, 7pp short” — instead of the more generic “CSAT is 78%, down 2pp month-on-month” you’d get without a target. Direction and benchmark commentary still apply where they change the read.
3. Ask Forepost picks up the same targets and references them when relevant.

Targets are deliberately separate from benchmarks. The benchmark tells you where the industry sits; the target tells you where you want to be. They often diverge — you might aim above the industry median because that’s your stated quality stance, or below it because you’re in a transition phase. Forepost reads both and lets you frame which matters this week. If a target is set but you haven’t entered the current value, the indicator stays neutral grey and says “Target X” with no hit/miss framing — silence beats fabricated motion, the same rule the sparklines follow.

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Sparklines (real, not extrapolated)

The small line on each card is the last seven days of real snapshots from your metrics_history — taken every time you save Settings or your helpdesk integration refreshes. If you’ve only got one snapshot (a fresh workspace), the line renders flat at the current value rather than extrapolating motion that didn’t happen. Once you have two days of history, the line starts moving. What this is not: a fitted curve from the WoW delta, an LLM imagination of a trend, or a smoothed seven-day average. It’s the most recent value seen on each of the last seven days, oldest-left, current-right.

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Why twelve and not forty

The product opinion is that a senior CX leader doesn’t need forty signals, they need a small set, watched well, every day. Adding more dilutes attention; the brief becomes a digest of a digest. Twelve is the line. Anything missing that you’d like Forepost to watch? Email kian@forepost.ai. Additions to the Watchlist are deliberate and rare.