In a huge improvement to our Linear workflow: we’re really excited to announce our Linear Customer Requests integration. 

As you link threads to Linear issues in Plain, we’ll automatically create Customer Requests in Linear, allowing you to view all Linear issues grouped by Customer (using the “Company” from Plain).

If you’d like us to backfill your existing thread links from Plain into Linear Customer Requests, just reach out to us through Slack. We’d be happy to backfill for you and save you the manual work. 

Check out our Linear docs for further information around this integration.

We’ve introduced team reporting – enabling workspace owners and admins to understand the impact that each individual team member is having on their support operations.

Owners and admins of workspaces can now see: 

• An overview of their whole team performance: including message send count, median first response time, median next response time, median resolution time. 

• A detail page for each team member where owners and admins can view: message send count, median first response time, median next response time, median resolution time, and threads assigned to each team member. 

Right now, only admins and owners can view team reporting. We’ll launch an update soon that will enable individual team members to drill down into their own performance. 

Team reporting is available on our Grow and Scale plans.

We’ve launched AI-powered suggested responses to help your team reply faster to support requests. These responses are generated using your previous customer conversations in Plain, along with your own docs or knowledge base – so they’re accurate and tailored specifically to your product and workflow. 

AI for B2B support is crucial to get right – it needs to be able to generate responses with the unique context of your product in mind. Our suggested responses speed up the time it takes your team to give detailed and helpful replies to your customers, without losing the human touch. 

When you’re given a suggested response in a thread, you can: 

• Accept and send exactly as it’s been suggested 

• Edit the suggested response before sending it to your customer 

• Discard the suggested response and write your own.

How to get started with suggested responses 

1. Turn on Plain AI and suggested responses in your workspace

Go to the “Plain AI” settings in your workspace. Toggle “Plain AI” and “Suggested responses” on. Once you’ve enabled both of these features, you’ll start seeing suggested responses in each of your support requests. Check out our docs for more detailed instructions. 

2. Add your knowledge sources

To give more context and generate better suggested responses – you can add your docs, knowledge base, or any other public URL through the “Knowledge Sources” settings or the Plain CLI. If you skip this step, suggested responses will be generated only using your previous replies. 

Suggested responses are available now for all scale tier customers. If you'd like a demo or are keen to hear about our upcoming AI features, you can book a call with us here.

Since announcing our live chat beta last month, we’ve made some significant updates – greatly improving the functionality of live chat, and improving your team’s workflow when triaging and answering questions you’ve received through chat. 

Customer identification 

You can now specify customer details such as their name and avatar when a support request is received.

You can also provide an email address which can link them to an existing customer in Plain, reducing the amount of back-and-forth you need to do with customers. You’ll need to authenticate this email address to ensure you’re speaking to the actual customer. You can learn more about setting up authentication in our docs. 

Enhance your chat triaging with Plain’s data model

You can add labels, tiers and tenants on the creation of a new chat session. For example, you could have a label for each section of your site so it’s clear where the customer has submitted the support request from. 

Additional customization of your chat widget 

We’ve introduced some new customization options to the chat widget including:

• Brand color: specify a color that will be used in various places throughout the chat widget – ensuring that it matches the UI and branding of your own product, regardless of where you need to add chat. You can introduce a different color for light/dark mode. 

• Embedding: choose if/where the chat application is shown in your page. This enables completely new user experiences such as a popup, or even entirely embedded in your own page(s).

• Logo: add your logo so the widget matches your own branding. 

• Entry point: decide if you want to skip the welcome screen entirely – letting your customers jump straight into a chat session.

• Chat buttons: customize and add additional chat buttons each (e.g. “Report a bug”, or “Get support”) with their own icon and text. These can even apply different labels, tiers and tenants – making it easier to triage questions that come through your chat.

Chat forms

Similar to chat buttons, you can provide a dropdown (more form controls to come later) when a user creates a new chat session, which can set the previously mentioned Plain data model attributes. 

Unread message emails 

Your customers will now receive emails when they’ve got an unread chat message from you – ensuring that if they leave the page they started the chat on, they’ll get a response and continue the conversation with you. 

Added chat to workflow rules 

You can now set workflow rules actions to trigger once you receive a request through chat. Automatically set a tier, add labels, set priority, assign to a specific user and more when you receive a chat. 

Introduced auto-responses for chat 

With auto-responses you can set expectations immediately about your response times when a customer reaches out through your chat widget. Auto-responses can be conditional, using tiers, labels and business hours to inform the content of your auto-response. 

To add these new features or get started with chat – check out our documentation

To prepare for the launch of some new AI features, we’ve just added a new “Plain AI” page to your workspace settings. The new settings page contains a top-level opt-in to AI for your workspace. 

The new settings page now contains toggles for Smart AI replies (currently in beta – let us know if you’d like to try it), auto-labeling, thread summaries, and thread titles.  

AI ingestion still lives within your Slack settings, and you can still choose to autofill your thread fields with AI in your thread fields settings. Note: you’ll be directed to the Plain AI settings page to enable AI for your workspace if these are not currently active.

All your AI settings have been preserved across the board with this update – e.g. If you had AI ingestion or auto-labeling turned on, they’re still turned on. 

As we’ve added more features to your sidebar – like thread links, recent threads, and discussions – it’s become a bit cluttered and hard to focus on the information you need. For this reason, we’re launching a redesigned sidebar, so you have more control over the information you see in each thread. 

You’ll notice a new toggle that allows you to switch between thread details and customer cards. A big piece of feedback we received that informed this redesign is that customer cards are shown too far down the sidebar. Now you can simply toggle between the two views – either by clicking on the view you want, or using CMD+1, CMD+2 keyboard shortcuts.

What each toggle contains: 

Thread details

The thread details view will show you all the information you’re used to. See who the customer is, the company they belong to, associated tiers, SLAs, and labels. You can also start discussions with your team, and link threads to Linear, Jira, or other threads as you’ve always done. 

Customer cards

Customer cards are a really powerful feature that allow you to show information from your own systems directly inside your support requests. With this update, you can view them when you need to get more context on how the customer is using your product to help you troubleshoot their issues. Keep important information at your fingertips, without having to switch between endless tabs.

We’re really excited to announce our Jira integration – now available on all plans. With this integration, you can create and link new issues in Jira straight from a customer request you’ve received in Plain. Jira issues can be linked from support requests received through any of your support channels.

The Jira integration will work very similarly to our Linear integration – easily log issues, bugs, and feature requests to Jira, and close the loop with your customers when the issue is marked as done in Jira. 

To link Jira to Plain, just follow the instructions in our docs – it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to get set up. 

Once you’ve linked Jira to Plain, you can start linking and creating issues from support requests – speeding up your support workflow and improving collaboration between your support and engineering teams.

What you’ll be able to do: 

• To link a customer request directly to a Jira issue – hit “Thread links” in your thread sidebar (keyboard shortcut: I), and choose “Link Jira issue”. 

• You can then choose to add the customer request to an existing Jira issue, or create a new one 

• If you’re creating a new Jira issue, we’ll auto-fill the description of the issue based on the content of the support request to speed up the process for you. 

• When a Jira issue is marked as done, any threads linked to the Jira issue will automatically pop back into your Todo list – so you can update your customers on the fix. 

New: Thread Links

Alongside our Jira integration, we’ve also released thread links – a new feature that allows you to link threads to one another. Once you mark one linked thread as done, all linked threads will move to close the loop, so you can respond to customers faster and more consistently. 

To link a thread to others, just hit “Thread links” in your thread sidebar (keyboard shortcut: I). From here, you can link multiple threads to each other, Jira issues, and Linear issues. 

Last month, we released Slack Digests – giving you daily insights into your Plain account activity delivered to Slack every weekday.

We received some feedback that different members of your team need to know different things about the state of your support queue, so we’ve decided to make some updates. 

You can now choose between 2 different digests (or use both) – to ensure the right people on your team have the correct overview of the information they need to know about your support queue at a glance. 

Daily Standup   

The new Daily Standup Digest is an updated version of our original digest. It aims to give you a brief, cohesive overview of your outstanding threads in “Todo”, and tags the members of your team that have threads assigned to them. 

This Digest is tailored towards the members of your team who are actively responding to support requests – we recommend using it in the mornings so you get a quick overview first thing about the threads that need to be actioned. 

Daily Summary  

The Daily Summary Digest is a brand new digest, aimed at giving you a high-level view into the health of your support queue. Threads that need high priority actions will be listed here – e.g. threads that have breached or are about to breach their SLAs, and threads that have been waiting for action for a long time. 

This Digest will be useful for Heads of Support, or team members who mightn’t be in the support weeds every day, but need to know about the high-level state of your support queue. We recommend turning it on at the end of the day so you get an idea of how your support team has performed throughout the day.

Check out our docs for more information on Slack Digests, and instructions on how to set them up.

We’ve launched multiple assignees, giving you the ability to add a lead assignee and co-assignees to threads. This was a highly-requested feature from lots of our existing customers – and it gives you the ability to collaborate better than before on support requests. 

Why is this useful? 

Improved collaboration 
Need to pull an engineer into a support request? Co-assign them so they get notified about updates, and so you can continue to keep track of the thread while they’re working on a fix. 

Clearer ownership of threads 
Are handovers and communication unclear between sales, success, and support? Assign a lead to the owner of the request, and make sure the relevant team members have continued visibility. 

Faster response times 
Clearer assignment = faster response times for your customers. Make sure the team that needs to help on a request is assigned from the get-go, and resolve issues faster than before. 

Notifications for co-assignees will work exactly the same as assignees – you’ll get the same notification if you’re assigned as a lead or co-assignee. 

Any thread you are assigned or co-assigned to will appear as usual in your “your threads” queue. The view sorting isn’t dependent on whether you’re a lead or not – it’ll only depend on the sorting (e.g. priority) you’ve chosen. 

Co-assignees are available now on all plans – let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

We're really excited to announce the first in a number of features we'll be launching to help you prioritize and understand customer feedback and feature requests – driven by your own customer data.

Today we are launching a new product insights page where you can see all of your customer requests and feedback.

To check it out go to "Product insights" from your left hand sidebar.

Here you will see every Linear issue ranked by the number of support requests associated with it. For every Linear issue, you can now also see the linked companies as well as tier breakdown to help you prioritize your backlog.

Clicking on any request shows even deeper insights, including which customers have asked for the feature, the request breakdown by tier, and all related threads that contain the customer requests.

We’re really excited to announce the beta release of our newest support channel for Plain: live chat. 

With our live chat widget, your customers can reach out to you without leaving your site or app – and you can respond to these messages directly in Plain. Live chat is traditionally quite a “separate” experience from the rest of your support channels – we want to change that and make chat feel native to your product. 

What’s available in beta? 

Unauthenticated live chat 
Our beta release of live chat includes unauthenticated chat only – meaning you’ll need to respond to each customer request to get their details. 

One live chat interface per workspace 
Right now, only one chat interface is available for each workspace. As we continue to iterate on chat over the next few weeks, we’ll allow multiple configurations. 

Start customizing your chat experience 
We’re launching chat beta with limited customization experience – as of today, you’re able to customize your chat widget to include your brand color. We’ll be constantly iterating on this over the next few weeks to give you more control over the behaviour the appearance of your chat widget(s).

When will the next version of chat be available? 

We’re planning to launch authenticated chat next week, with more customization options and auto-responders to fast-follow. If you’d like to try the beta version, check out the instructions below if you’re a current Plain customer. If you’re not using Plain yet and want to take our chat beta for a spin – book your onboarding session today. We’d love to show you around. 

How to add chat to your workspace: 

To turn chat beta on in your workspace, head to your workspace Settings → Chat. After creating your chat app, you will be provided with a snippet of code that you can embed in your website or app. This will add the chat widget to your site. We recommend adding this to all pages of your site. View full instructions in our docs.

Today, we’re launching a kanban board view – giving your team better visibility into all your open customer requests. With the kanban board, you can view all threads from all your customer channels, at once. 

Once turned on, the kanban board will be enabled across your queue on all your queue and status pages, tier page, and label page. 

Add filters 
You can filter your kanban board by any property to get a detailed of the threads you need. Filter by assignee, tier, label, SLA, status, and more – by hitting “Filters” on the top right hand side of your queue view (keyboard shortcut: F). 

Drag and drop 
You can quickly drag and drop individual customer requests to change their status, tier, or label. 

Bulk actions 
To change the status, tier, or label of multiple threads at once, hit “shift+cmd+click” to individually select the threads you want to bulk action.You can then simply drag and drop them into the column you want to move them to. 

Update assignee 
You can easily update the assignee of a thread straight from the kanban view. Just hit the avatar of the current assignee to change it to another person. 

How to enable kanban view 
You can turn on the kanban view for your own personal workspace by hitting “Display” (keyboard shortcut: V) on the top right hand side of your queue view. Select “Board” and you’ll see the kanban view appear. Once you turn it on, this will be your personal default view – it’s not possible to enable kanban at a workspace level. 

Today we’re releasing daily Slack digests. You’ll get a summary of your Plain account activity delivered to Slack every weekday. Digests are currently only available via our Slack integration. 

Digests will send the following information to your notification channel every weekday at a time of your choice: 

• Number of threads waiting for first response and the 3 most recent threads title and link

• Number of threads waiting for next response and the 3 most recent threads title and link

• Counts for threads being investigated, waiting to close the loop, and paused

To turn on daily Slack digests for your team: Go to Workspace settings → Notifications → Create (or edit) a Slack integration → Choose Digests. Check our docs for more info or reach out to us if you've got any questions.

We've scheduled an essential maintenance window on Plain, during which we will upgrade our main database cluster.

When: Wednesday, 2nd October at 6AM to 8AM UTC.

• New York (EDT): 2AM

• Berlin (CET): 8AM

• California (PDT): 11PM on the 1st of October

• Sydney (AET): 4PM

What to expect during this time:

• There will be no access to app.plain.com

• The API will be unavailable

• Webhooks will not be sent

• Notifications will not be sent

Rest assured:

• There will be no data loss: all inbound emails, Slack messages, MS Teams messages, Linear issue updates and data from importers will be safely queued and processed after the downtime. No information or customer messages will be lost.

• SLA tracking won't stop during downtime. Breached SLAs during this maintenance window will trigger an alert right after the maintenance is over.

• Flexible timing: we've set a 2-hour window as a precaution, but we are working hard to minimize the actual downtime

What you need to do:
We strongly recommend planning around this maintenance window with your team to reduce the impact on your internal processes. If you use our API, make sure your code gracefully handles HTTP 503 errors during this time.

We’ve redesigned your queue view to make it more space efficient and easier to scan – ensuring your queue covers the key information you need, where you need it. This redesign makes it easier to pull out the information that matters from your queue. 

What’s changed:

• Same information, with cleaner design
  All the information in your queues is still there, but the design has been refreshed across all status views, as well as on your company and customer pages. 

• Clearer Priorities
  SLAs have been moved for better visibility, new avatars are in place, and we’ve generally tidied things up to make your queue more efficient. It’s easier to spot what needs action at a glance, speeding up your workflow.

• Better on Smaller Screens
  Sometimes you’re not working through your queue on a big screen. We’ve introduced a new table format so your queue is visible on all screen sizes. Scroll through your queue and still see key info, even on a smaller screen.

• Updated In-Thread Queue View
  Your in-thread queue view now has clearer SLA info, and thread titles and descriptions have been tidied up, making it easier for you to prioritize the threads you need to action next. 

The queue redesign has been turned on for all workspaces in Plain, no action is needed on your side to enable them. Please reach out via your shared Slack channel, or email us (help@plain.com). 

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll ship some further updates to your queue view – including: 

• The ability to hide columns in the new queue view, so you can focus on the information that your team needs

• Kanban queue view

Today, we’re rolling out Workflow Rules to help your support team save time and avoid manual work in Plain. With customizable conditions and actions, you can automate repetitive tasks and streamline your team’s processes.

Some common use-cases include:

• Assign all support requests from specific companies or tiers to specific members of your team (e.g. all Enterprise threads get assigned to Simon).

• Automatically assign certain priorities to threads if they contain key phrases or words (e.g. all threads containing the word “urgent” get assigned “urgent” priority).

• Assign threads based on the support email your customer has reached out to (e.g. assign all security@ emails to Matt)

We’ve built core conditions you can choose from to trigger automations: 

• A label is applied to a thread.

• Customer is from a specific company.

• Customer reached out via a specific Slack channel.

• Thread is tagged with a specific tier (like Enterprise).

• Thread was sent to a specific support email (e.g. sales@yourcompany.com).

• Thread contains certain keywords (e.g. vulnerability, bug).

When the chosen condition matches a thread, we’ll automate the following actions: 

• Assign a thread to the right person.

• Set thread priority.

• Apply a label of your choice.

Workflow Rules are available now to all existing customers on our Grow tier and above. To manage your workflow rules go to Settings → Workflow Rules. Check out our docs for more information. 

Today we’re shipping another status update to help tidy up your support queue. Now, customer requests are automatically marked as Done after a set number of days have passed (you choose how many). 

Sometimes customers find their own answers or simply don’t respond. This update helps keep your queue clear of requests that no longer need your team’s attention.

To introduce this new automation to your support workflow, just head to the workflow section of your workspace settings, and choose how many days you’d like to wait before your threads are automatically marked as done. 

This means that if you set threads to automatically move to waiting for customer when you reply directly in Slack, those threads will now also auto-mark as Done – meaning your queue starts to manage itself over time. 

We’ve also worked on some stellar quality of life updates to the Plain app, check them out below 👇

The hardest part of support is showing up where your customers are.

Today we’re releasing our Microsoft Teams integration – making it easier for your team to support your customers where they already are.

In just a few minutes, you can connect Microsoft Teams to Plain, consolidating your support stack and simplifying your workflow. Support all your customers from one fast, extensible platform.

With our Teams integration, you’ll give your VIP customers the attention they deserve. Utilize Tiers to ensure you’re prioritizing the right customer requests, and organize your queue however you need (e.g. by pricing structure). Stay ahead of every request with customizable SLAs and real-time breach alerts.

Check out our docs for more details on how to set up Microsoft Teams with Plain. Book a demo today if you’d like to learn more – we’d love to show you around. 

Today we’re excited to release new statuses in Plain. We’ve heard and implemented these changes based on feedback we’ve received over the past couple of months – and you’ll now have a better overview of the progress you’re making on your support threads. The new statuses better reflect how support teams work.

Previously, there were 3 statuses in Plain: Todo, Snoozed and Done. These covered the basics, but didn’t help you understand the status of in progress threads without some digging.

Today we’re introducing several new statuses to bring more structure to your support queue. 

Todo is now broken down into more relevant statuses, so you know what a thread is waiting on: 

• Needs first response – a customer got in touch over a new issue and they are waiting for you to reply 

• Needs next response – this status indicates that this isn’t a new thread, and there’s already been some back-and-forth with your customer 

• Investigating – threads that your team are actively finding the root cause for

Snoozed is now broken up into 2 sections, making the purpose behind the snooze clearer for your team:

• Waiting for customer – you are waiting for the customer to reply

• Paused for later – the thread is snoozed because your team are doing the work required to actually close the thread and solve the issue for your customer

With these new statuses come some improved workflow upgrades for you and your team:

• Improved status picker UI
  Previously to change the status of a thread, you had to choose it from the sidebar. Statuses can now be changed from the quick action bar below the composer (keyboard shortcut: S)

• Improved status syncing between Slack and Plain:
  When you respond to a support request in Slack, the thread will automatically move to “waiting for customer” – meaning you don’t need to make updates in Plain and Slack. Your customer support queue will accurately represent the status of each thread, regardless of whether you’ve replied in Plain or Slack.

• Bulk actions on statuses are here
  You can now change the status of your customer threads in bulk, rather than updating them one-by-one. 

If you are currently consuming status transition webhook events, there are no required changes you need to make right now. However, in the coming weeks, we will get in touch with you to offer a migration path to get webhook events including the new statuses.

Today’s release is just the start of some really exciting UI and workflow changes that we’ll be making over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more updates.  🎉