Changelog

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 Linear issues page where you can see all of your customer requests and feedback.

To check it out go to "Linear issues" 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.  🎉

We’ve shipped a few importers this year, including Zendesk, Salesforce, and Freshdesk. This week, we’re excited to be adding another importer to our repertoire, with a Help Scout importer. Sync or migrate your customer data to Plain in just a few clicks to speed up your support workflow and consolidate your support channels.

Once you connect Help Scout to Plain for the first time, we’ll import all your existing data. After the initial migration has taken place, any new end user, conversation, thread, or tag created in HelpScout will automatically be synced to Plain.

Check out our docs to learn more about how you can migrate your Help Scout data to Plain in just a few hours.

Earlier this year we announced thread fields – allowing you to customize the data stored on a thread object to your liking.

Today, we’ve added the ability to filter reporting on boolean and enum thread fields in your team’s insights tab. You now have access to a breakdown of your thread fields across all possible values, and can dig into a specific field/value combination to check out how your support team is handling those requests.

With today’s launch, you can learn about your first response times, next response times, resolution times, and more – per thread field.

If you don’t currently use thread fields in Plain, you can utilize thread fields AI to start creating these key insights for your team, without your team having to fill them out per thread.

In addition to Slack, email, in-app forms, and headless portal, today we're announcing a new channel to Plain: Discourse. Consolidate your support stack even more and get consistent with how you do cross-channel support.

Check out our docs to learn how to connect your company's Discourse community.

You'll start receiving Discourse posts in Plain immediately, and use features like our Linear integration and discussions to collaborate better on these requests with your team.

Customize the priority, labels and assignee of support requests from Discourse based on their category, author and content, and get a birds-eye view of all your support requests in one consolidated platform.

Today, in conjunction with our work to introduce automated billing at Plain, we’ve introduced new roles and permissions for our customers.

At Plain, we believe that everyone at a company that values support, should have access to support. If you’re an engineer, you need it to debug. If you’re a PM, you need it to get feedback. Support is, and should be utilized as a window into your users.

With our new roles, this is super easy. It’s also extremely transparent. When you need to add or remove a member from your team – you’ll see upfront exactly how much it’ll cost.

What are the new roles?

We’ve adjusted the roles to better align with the way that our customers are using Plain.

• Owner: Full access to everything, including billing, deleting workspaces, managing workspace settings and API keys.

• Admin: Access to everything in Plain except for billing and deleting workspaces.

• Support: Can message customers and use all in-app features.

• Viewer: Can view all support requests and participate in internal discussions, but cannot send messages to customers via Plain. Viewer seats are completely free, and unlimited.

Note: Owner, Admin, and Support seats are paid seats in Plain, while viewer seats are free. View our full pricing breakdown here.

There should be no impact for existing customers. New and existing customers can now manage billing and roles directly from your workspace settings.

Today, we’re super excited to announce headless support portals can now be built with Plain.

With a headless support portal, you can enable your customers to see their open threads, start new threads, and check on the progress of issues, all from a portal that’s embedded in your own app.

This week, we’ve shipped the ability to add and remove Slack emoji reactions, directly in Plain.

Previously, if you wanted to add or remove an emoji reaction to a thread ingested to Plain through Slack, you had to open Slack to take action.

Now, you can react with Slack emojis directly in Plain. This allows you to get more consistent with how you support your Slack customers through Plain. No action is required to turn them on – Slack emoji reactions are automatically enabled for all Plain customers.

Today we’ve shipped auto-responses for Slack – allowing you to set better expectations on response times with customers you support through Slack.

We’ve also made tons of improvements to Slack discussions, check them out in our "New" section below.

Previously, auto-responses were only available for threads created through email or via API. To set up Slack auto-responses, head to your workspace settings → auto-responses and create a new one. You can decide if you want to send different auto-responses based on the channel the thread is sourced from, and add conditions to let you decide who receives what message. More detailed instructions are available in our docs.

Today we've shipped a quick action bar on notifications, which enable you to take common actions on a thread without leaving Slack.

Previously for any action you want to take on a plain thread, you needed to open your browser and open the Plain dashboard. Opening Plain is useful for when you want to draft a response or drive a discussion, but we wanted to make it easier for you to do the majority of the smaller common tasks you’d typically do from Plain – directly in Slack.

In-Slack actions from notifications are now available by default – no action is required to turn them on.

Today, we’re excited to announce Plain broadcasts, a free, standalone app that lets you send key updates – like product launches, newsletters, and downtime alerts – to differentiated groups of your customers in Slack.

How does this work alongside Plain?
When a customer responds to a message that you’ve sent with broadcasts in Slack, it’ll be picked up as usual in any channel where you’ve added the Plain app.

How do I use it?
To start using Plain broadcasts to update your customers, connect your Slack workspace to the Plain broadcasts app. You can then build out different audiences and start sending messages to your customer groups.

To find broadcasts from your main Plain workspace, just click your workspace name in the top left corner of Plain, and select “broadcasts” (or cmd+k to search for it).

More detailed instructions are available in our docs.

If you’re a frequent flyer of our changelog, you’ll have noticed we’ve been shipping updates to discussions over the past few weeks. June shall forever be known as “discussion month” at Plain, because we’ve got another one for you today.

This week, we’ve released the ability to view and reply to discussions – directly in Plain.

We initially launched discussions to make it easier for you to collaborate in Plain. We followed-up last week with allowing you to start discussions directly in Plain, and from this week, you can fully lead discussions from within Plain without having to jump back and forward from Slack.

Speed up your workflow by starting, replying to, and viewing discussions without ever leaving Plain. To view and reply to a discussion, just hit “discussion in #channel” on the sidebar and – like magic – you can collaborate with your teammates immediately. We’ve also introduced rich text formatting to discussions so you can respond in the format you need to.

This week we’ve improved our discussions feature – allowing you to start new discussions directly in Plain. Move faster with your team by creating discussions directly in your Plain threads.

We’ve also shipped AI-generated titles for threads. Immediately see at a glance what a thread is about, and move through your queue even faster.

Starting discussions in Plain

A few weeks ago with the introduction of discussions, we made it easier for you to collaborate on Plain threads with your team. Today, we’re building on those foundations – allowing you to start those discussions directly in Plain threads.

To start discussions directly in Plain, you’ll need to first add Plain to the channels you want to use for discussions. Don’t worry, we’ll separate those from the channels that are dedicated to handling customer requests. Check out our docs for detailed instructions.

AI-generated titles for threads

With this new release, if you’ve enabled thread titles (settings → workflow), we’ll automatically generate titles for threads created without a title through our API or via Slack.

This is particularly useful for threads that originate in Slack. Slack threads will no longer show under unactionable titles like “Slack message in #channel-name”. –Instead, they’ll be automatically generated for you based on the content of the thread.

Save time and make your support queue easier to review – regardless of where your threads originate from.

This week we’re releasing conditional auto-responses, giving you more control over which customers receive your automatic replies.

We’ve also shipped a new thread discussions feature that makes it easier to discuss support requests with your team.

Conditional auto-responses

A few months ago, we released auto-responses, letting you reply to all new threads with a custom message. With today’s release, you can configure multiple auto-responses with customizable conditions to let you decide who receives what message.

You can add conditions based on your business hours and the customer’s tier. You can use this, for example, to let your Enterprise customers know how to reach you out of hours, while letting Free tier customers know to expect a response during your regular support hours.

If you have a thread that matches the conditions for multiple auto-responses, then only the first matching auto-response is sent. If you don’t set any conditions at all, the same auto-response will go to all customers. We delay the auto-response by 60 seconds to enable you to make any asynchronous changes (i.e. as a response to our webhooks) that might impact auto-response eligibility.

You can configure auto-responses in Settings → Auto-responses.

Thread discussions

We’re making it easier to discuss Plain threads with your team.

When you paste a link to a Plain thread in Slack, we’ll now unfurl the link to provide a brief preview of the Plain thread.

We’ll also create a reference to the Slack message within the Plain thread, allowing you to quickly navigate to any ongoing discussions around a particular thread. This reference or the discussion will not be visible to the customer.

Links will not be unfurled if the link is posted by someone who is not a user in Plain, posted in a private channel Plain doesn't have access to, or posted in a Slack Connect channel.

This setting is now available for anyone to use. You can turn it off by heading to Settings → Slack.

Insights gives you a detailed view of all your support and helps you to spot trends, identify issues and ensure that every customer is getting the right level of support.

Insights help you to answer questions like:

• Are we prioritizing support requests correctly?

• What product areas are creating most of our support volume?

• Are we meeting all of our SLAs?

• What companies are we speaking with the most?

• Are we becoming more efficient?

Have more questions? Click into the data to keep exploring yourself.

Using Insights

Understand your support workload by following metrics:

1. Support volume: The number of threads in your queue at any given point in time.

2. First response time: How quickly your customers receive a first reply from you.

3. Resolution time: How long it takes you to resolve support requests.

Each metric is broken down to display the median and 90th percentile for either the current day, last 7 days or last 28 days.

You will also see a volume breakdown of each metric by Company, Tier, or Label and whether the metric is trending upward or downward.

Check in at a glance

The overview immediately tells you if you're staying on top of the queue, keeping your first response time down and resolving threads in a reasonable time.

Dig in and explore

Click into any attribute to see even more metrics such as Tier, Label, Company, or Channel.

For example, you might want to filter by Tier to see how your resolution time trends across Enterprise, Paid and Free Tier customers.

Integrated everywhere

Wherever you are in Plain, hover over an attribute and see data right away. Click 'View more' and you’ll be directed to deeper metrics.

More information on each metrics and how to use Insights is in our docs.

This is just the beginning. More metrics related to Next Response Time, SLA Compliance, and much more is coming soon 👀.

Sync or migrate your data to Plain in just a few clicks with our latest Salesforce and Zendesk importers.

Our Salesforce importer allows you to create Customers and Tenants in Plain from Contacts and Accounts in Salesforce so you have the exact same account hierarchy in your workspace when you receive support requests from your customers.

Additionally, our Zendesk importer lets you migrate support tickets, customers, and tags from Zendesk to Plain so you don’t lose a single piece of context when switching over. Instructions on how to use both importers are available in our docs under Integrations.

We’ve also shipped a few significant improvements to the Plain app that you won’t want to miss👇.

Today, we’re releasing three foundational building blocks to make Plain even better for B2B products: Tenants, Tiers, and SLAs.

Tenants

In most B2B SaaS products, users are grouped into workspaces or similar concepts. Our new Tenants feature helps you group your customers in Plain the same way they are grouped in your product. Whether that’s by Workspace, Team , Project or Organization, you can now mirror these concepts in Plain.

This removes the need to context switch to an internal dashboard just to find out which tenant (or team) a customer belongs to.

For more detail, view our docs.

Tiers

You might offer different pricing tiers or levels of support to customers. Now, you can directly map every tenant, customer, and support request to a Tier in Plain, making it much easier to prioritize requests for certain Tiers (e.g. “Enterprise first, then Pro, then everyone else”).

You can also set a default Tier that will automatically apply to all customers.

To configure Tiers, go to Settings → Tiers.

SLAs

You can now set up SLAs for first response times. SLAs will notify you via Slack or Discord when a support request has gone unanswered for too long and is close to breaching your SLA.

You can configure SLAs to match your needs: You can set the same SLA for everyone, or set granular SLAs per priority level, tenant or tier.

You can also choose to apply business hours or have SLAs apply 24x7. You can manage Tiers & SLAs manually in the app or using the API. To configure SLAs, you can also find these in Settings → Tiers.

For more detail, view our docs.

Today, we're making the core of Plain's data model completely extensible with the introduction of thread fields.

Thread fields allow you to customise the data stored on a thread object to your liking. For example, you can use thread fields to:

• Keep track of the product area that the customer is asking about

• Save important IDs and details about the support request.

• Track simple todos before snoozing a support request for later

While many products have a "custom fields" concept, they often feel secondary – custom – to their products, rather than native and fully integrated. With our thread fields feature, we want to bring the same programmatic extensibility our customers already love about Plain, to our data model.

Thread fields in Plain are:

Completely integrated into the Plain workflow. You can either set their values in the sidebar, or we'll automatically ask you to fill in any required fields using just a couple of keystrokes (or clicks, if that's your thing) when you mark a thread as Done. Try it – it's so fast it feels a little magical. ✨

Nestable. You can show fields conditionally based on the value of a different field. For example, setting a Product Area field to Dashboard can then show another field Dashboard Version with a dropdown list of options.

AI-powered. You can enable individual fields to be populated with AI using information in the thread.

A core part of our API. As with all Plain features, you can interact with fields both in the app and using our API.

Start using thread fields

Thread fields are powered by a strict schema that you control, making them powerful yet predictable:

• Fields can be of a specific type (e.g. text, boolean, dropdown etc.).

• As noted above, fields can be nested to show conditional fields based on the selected value of a different field.

• Fields can be required before a thread can be marked as done to encourage good data collection. If you try to mark a thread as done before completing the required fields, a small screen appears to allow you to quickly fill out required fields and move on to the next thread.

You can implement thread fields by heading to Settings → Thread fields, or read more in our docs or API reference.We're really excited to be releasing this feature, and can't wait to hear what you think. We already have a long list of further improvements planned and can't wait to share them with you soon.

We have released some improvements to Company support in Plain this week.

You can now search for companies in our search bar. Selecting a company will take you to a page showing all the current threads for that company.

Additionally we have released a companies page which shows all the companies in your Plain workspace along with a summary of how many threads are in ‘Todo’ or in ‘Snoozed’. This can be found in the left hand side navigation menu with the label ‘Companies’.

This is just the start of what we have planned for this page, so watch this space for more improvements coming soon.

We now support connecting multiple Slack workspaces into your Plain workspace, with different ingestion settings for each Slack workspace.

If you have Slack Connect channels in your main Slack workspace but also maintain a separate Slack Community workspace, you can now track customer requests from both of them in Plain.

Moreover, we’ve added two new ways of ingesting Slack messages into Plain:

The AI mode automatically groups messages based on whether they belong together, leveraging an AI model to determine if they are part of the same conversation. When enabled, messages will be grouped into one thread, or split into different ones, depending on the message contents.

One-to-one mode always associates a Slack message on a channel and its thread to a single Plain thread.

This is in addition to our existing modes, Manual (e.g. by leaving a :ticket: emoji), and Automatic, which ingests all messages.

This week we have released the ability to mention other Plain users in notes.

Users who are mentioned will receive a notification through their normal channel for personal notifications (email or Slack). These notifications are on by default but can be configured at Settings → Personal notifications.

Starting today, you can customize which Slack messages are ingested into Plain. You now have two ingestion modes: automatic (default) and manual (new).

When automatic ingestion is enabled, Plain automatically adds all messages in a Slack channel to Plain. Individual messages are intelligently grouped into a thread, and replies within a thread show up in the corresponding thread in Plain. This is the default behaviour.

When manual ingestion is enabled, you can choose which Slack messages to add to Plain. You can do this by reacting to them with an emoji of your choice, like 🎫. You can define this in Settings. Any threaded Slack messages will then be tracked automatically in Plain.

You can toggle the ingestion behavior under Settings → Slack → Slack message ingestion settings.

Our goal with Plain is to give you a single pane of glass across all your customer interactions, and to put those interactions into context – to show you the customer data you already have, help you coordinate all the work you do on behalf of customers with your product and engineering teams, and speed up your workflow.

Now, we’ve brought Plain to where most B2B companies talk to their customers: Slack. Our Slack integration automatically tracks customer messages for you in both private and public Slack Connect channels, consolidates them into a dedicated Slack channel of your choosing as well as the Plain app, and gives you an easy way to coordinate with your team.

This means you can now use the Plain app and API to talk to your customers wherever they are – all backed by our incredibly fast workflow, deep integrations into tools like Linear, powerful API, and integrated with your own data.

Our Slack integration is now available to both new and existing customers. Add as many channels as you like by heading to Settings > Slack in your Plain workspace, or by signing up here.

Below, we break down what makes our Slack integration special.

Rock-solid reliability

Trust is priceless. Our biggest priority in building our Slack integration was to make it extremely reliable.

🔄 Rock-solid, intelligent syncing. We’ve built Plain to sync every single message correctly, (nearly) without fail. Our success rate for message ingestion is currently at 99.94%. Multiple individual messages are automatically grouped into one thread – no more merging tickets.

❤️ Emojis speak louder than words. Sometimes a 👍🏼 says it all, and sometimes the moment calls for a custom :leslieknope: reaction. Slack reactions – including custom ones – are shown in Plain just like any other message, alongside any other formatting.

☕ Single stream of live notifications. Plain aggregates messages from all your customer channels into a single view. Our notifications are live-updating, so you’re never looking at old information on a previous notification. Sit back, relax, reply.

Write in Plain as you would in Slack

We want you to be able to write the way you always do, so we've invested in a first-class writing and reading experience within Plain.

🎨 Every formatting detail accounted for. Sometimes you say it in bold, sometimes with code, sometimes with attachments, sometimes with ❤️. Every message is full of important nuances and details. Formatting from Slack gets carried over to Plain and vice versa, so you’re never missing any meaning.

💬 Keep tabs without having to join channels. You can send a Slack message from Plain to every channel the bot is added to – regardless of whether you’re in it personally. Now you can both keep your support team in the loop and your Slack channels tidy.

🤖 Respond as yourself – or your doppelganger. Keep the conversation personal. Messages to channels that you’re already in are sent from your account; and messages to channels that you’re not in are sent by a friendly bot that looks just like you.

See your Slack conversations in context

By syncing customer messages from Slack to Plain, you gain all of Plain's powerful triage, prioritization and context features.

✨Auto-label and prioritize. Plain automatically triages, labels and summarizes incoming Slack messages so you can work through the most important questions first. Individual threads can be grouped by company, so you see all questions from the same customer in one place. You can also use customer groups to categorize threads based on your own business logic – for example, segmenting your Enterprise customers from your Free tier customers.

📊 Pull in customer data from your product. With customer cards, you can show information from your own systems while looking at a customer in Plain. This ensures that you always have important context at your fingertips, including billing and usage of your product.

🧠 Consolidate your channels into one place. Consolidate customer questions from Slack, email, and in-app forms so that you can fly through your support queue in one place.

Try it out now by heading to Settings > Slack in your Plain workspace, or by signing up here and using our docs to set up.

This week we’ve released some improvements aimed at optimizing your workflow in Plain and making it even more efficient.

Right-click context menu

When you right-click on a thread in a queue, a context menu will appear. This menu gives you multiple quick actions to scan and triage your support workflow, without having to click into the individual thread. You can assign or un-assign a user, snooze a thread, or modify labels, customer groups, and priorities.

Snippet improvements

We’ve also made it easier to manage snippets. You can now create or modify snippets directly from the composer, without needing to navigate to Settings.

When you highlight text in the composer and click the snippet button, a snippet panel will appear with the selected text and you can quickly save a new snippet.

You can also create new snippets or edit existing ones from the snippet palette with either the [ key or the snippet button.

Lastly, we’ve added search to the snippet Settings page so you can quickly scan your snippet repository to find the right one.