We’ve launched 3 major updates to how work is structured, assigned, and escalated in Plain. With new support for teams, sub-labels, and escalation paths, you can now reflect how you structure your teams directly in your workspace and build powerful workflows around it.

Teams

Teams are a new type of label that represent functional groups in your organization, such as Support, Engineering, or Success. You can add users to teams and use them to structure, route, and escalate work across your organization. Teams can also have sub-teams (see sub-labels below), which makes it easier to mirror your internal org and responsibilities within Plain.

Being part of a team allows you to:

• Receive Slack notifications when something is assigned to your team. Notifications are now filterable by team, so you’ll only see updates relevant to the teams you’re part of. You can also filter notifications by any label, not just team labels.

• Use views to show only threads for your that team. This is done by creating saved views filtered to a specific team label (or any label).

• Automate assignment to a team using workflow rules, such as labeling a thread based on the originating Slack channel – e.g. give all threads that relate to API issues to the API team.

Sub-labels

Sub-labels let you nest labels into a hierarchy up to three levels deep. This makes it easier to manage large or complex sets of labels by grouping related topics and reducing clutter. For example, nested in your Engineering label, you may have “Platform”, “API”, and “App”, to clearly define the area of your product a request relates to.

When a nested label is applied to a thread, its parent labels are automatically applied too. The same applies in reverse when removing labels.

This nesting behavior also works with team labels and supports sub-teams, making it easier to organize and filter by both topic and responsibility.

Escalation paths

Escalation paths allow you to define a sequence of teams or users who should handle a thread if it needs to be escalated. For example, a thread can start with Level 1 Support, and if it can’t be solved by the team, you can escalate it to Engineering or a specific individual by simply hitting “Escalate” below the composer. 

Workflow rules can assign an escalation path automatically, and team members can escalate with a single click – for example, if the initial team can’t help or needs to loop in Engineering, escalate to the next level. Each escalation step reassigns the thread to the next level.

Escalation paths can work in combination with team labels, allowing one team label to be removed and another added as a thread moves through escalation.

Teams and sub-labels are available on all plans, while escalation paths are available on our Scale tier only.

To use these features: 

• Create teams and sub labels in Settings → Labels.

• Add members to teams directly in the team label.

• Set up escalation paths in Settings → Escalation Paths.

• Automate your escalation flow in Settings → Workflow Rules.

• Filter notifications by team in Settings → Notifications.

• Build saved views filtered by team labels so your teams have easy access to their queues.

Check out our docs for full instructions on how you can utilize these new features.