Plain 101
Channels
- Email
- Slack
- Discord
- Chat
- Microsoft Teams
- Contact forms
- Headless portal
Using Plain
Integrations
Quickstart
Everything you need to know to start supporting your customers with Plain.
Plain is the most collaborative support platform for B2B support teams. It’s got everything you need to consolidate all your support channels, and help your customers in a modern, AI-powered platform.
This quickstart guide will walk you through how to set up your workspace and start helping your customers.
The basics
Everything in Plain happens in your team’s workspace. If you’ve not yet created your workspace, or want to learn more about Plain, book a demo with us so we can run you through your setup.
If you’ve already done your demo call – you can create your workspace here.
To start answering customer requests in Plain, you should begin by connecting your Slack, email, Discord, or chat:
- Slack - Our Slack integration lets you sync messages from selected Slack channels to Plain and respond directly to customers from the platform. Learn more about setting up Slack with Plain.
- Email – You can link your support email and start receiving customer request in minutes. For more information on how to connect your email addresses to Plain, check out the docs
- Discord – Enable seamless communication between your Discord server and Plain workspace. Check out the Discord docs for setup instructions (it only takes a few minutes).
- Chat – Our Chat widget lets you embed a live chat interface on your website or app, allowing your customers to reach out to you without leaving your site. Learn how to set up Chat.
You can also build a totally on-brand support portal and in-app forms to match your branding and UI, and structure your support queries.
To add team members to your Plain workspace and assign roles, navigate to Settings → Members in your workspace. You can add your entire team to Plain for free - we’ll only charge you for users that actively send messages to customers.
Available roles include:
- 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.
To be notified of new support requests, set up notifications.
We recommend, as a minimum, setting up one shared Slack or Discord channel where new support requests are posted. We also recommend setting up personal notifications so you can be notified of new replies and activity on threads you are assigned to.
Connecting your Linear workspace to Plain will let you quickly and seamlessly log bugs and feature requests to Linear without leaving Plain.
Once a Linear issue is resolved, the linked customer thread will move to “Close the Loop” status, reminding you to update the customer on the fix.
You can connect to Linear by selecting your workspace name in the top left hand side of your Plain workspace, and selecting Settings → Linear.
Connecting your Jira workspace will help your quickly and easily log bugs, issues, and feature requests to Jira, without ever leaving Plain.
Once a Jira issue is resolved, the linked customer thread will move to “Close the Loop” status, reminding you to update the customer on the fix.
Connect to Jira by navigating to your workspace settings, and selecting Settings → Jira.
Speed up your workflow
Labels are a lightweight but powerful way to categorize threads in Plain. You can configure the labels that make sense for you in Settings → Labels.
Snippets are templated messages that allow you to pull common language to message customers more quickly. You can configure them in Settings → Snippets
An autoresponder can be useful in situations of acute support load, such as during incidents, or to confirm you received a support request and manage expectations with customers.
We make it easy to fly through your workflow without ever needing to use a mouse. Learn about our keyboard shortcuts here. We’ve also added hints throughout the app on which keyboard shortcuts to use.
Use workflow rules to help you automate common actions your team takes. With customizable conditions and actions, you can automate repetitive tasks and streamline your team’s processes.
Plain AI is built to remove repetitive tasks from your teams’ workload, and automate the responses to your support requests.
- Speed up your team and your FRT with our AI-powered workflow features.
- Get Plain AI to draft suggested responses to support requests, based on your knowledge base or documentation.
- Index your documentation or knowledge base in your Plain settings or use the Plain CLI.
Organize your workspace
In Plain you can see what company a customer belongs to, so you have more context when providing support. You’ll be able to dig into all support data around a customer on their individual company page.
You can organize your customers to mirror how your product is structured. For example, if in your product all of your customers belong to a team/org/account/workspace then you would create a tenant per team/org/account/workspace.
Tiers add support for defining SLAs so you can enforce a first-response time for different support tiers within your product or pricing.
When configuring an SLA you can set when you want to be warned of a breach. For example if your first response time SLA is 4 hours, you might want to be notified 30 minutes before a breach so you can still reply in time. They can be set for first response time and next response time.
By default, SLAs apply at all times. They can be configured to only count working hours by toggling on Only during business hours. To configure business hours go to Settings → Business hours.
Our saved views allows your team to create and save different views of your support queue at a workspace level (saved views are not currently available at an individual level).
With saved views, your team can customize and save different views based on various different properties.
These are powerful for a few different use cases: like account managers who need to stay tight on certain customer groups, support teams who split the ownership/management of their support queue by channel, and support teams where different customers get a different level of service (e.g. free and enterprise plans).
Adding context
To provide support more quickly, get more context into Plain from your own systems.
Customer cards let you show live information from your own systems in Plain. This lets you bring important, business-specific context to Plain and makes it even easier to help customers without jumping through different tabs.
Events let you log important customer actions, errors, releases, and other key events to Plain. This gives you the full picture in the context of a support request as to what happened and why.
To be able to keep track of additional information related to a support request, you can configure additional custom fields you want to store on a thread (like product area, needs followup, Github issue etc.).
Plain is built API first so that you can build countless other use cases into your support stack.
Learn more about our API and make your first API call.
Feedback & questions
If you have any feedback on our docs, we’d love to hear it! Open an issue straight in Github or drop us an email at help@plain.com and an engineer on the team will help you.
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