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Plain’s Customer Inbox gives your customers a single, consistent place to create, track, and reply to their threads, regardless of which channel they used to get in touch (Slack, email, chat, and more). New requests submitted via the Customer Inbox flow straight into your team’s Plain queue alongside all other channels.
Customer Inbox in Plain

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Enabling the Customer Inbox

To turn on Customer Inbox:
  1. Go to Help Center → Customer Inbox in Plain
  2. Toggle on Customer Inbox
  3. Select your preferred Thread visibility option (see below)
  4. Click Save
Once enabled, customers will see a “Your requests” section in the sidebar of your Help Center. Email must be enabled as a channel before you can use the Customer Inbox.

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Logging in

Customers log in using a 6-digit code sent to their email, no password needed. The email address must match a customer record in Plain. Once authenticated, they’ll see their threads organized by status. Customers see a simplified version of Plain’s internal statuses:

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Submitting new requests

Customers can submit new threads directly from the Customer Inbox. By default this is a single open text field, but you can configure a custom form to collect structured information upfront, like issue type, priority, or product area. See Custom forms → for details.

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Thread visibility

Control which threads each customer can see under Help Center → Customer Inbox → Thread visibility:
  • Only their own threads (default): Each customer sees only requests they submitted themselves
  • Threads from anyone in their tenant: Useful for B2B teams where multiple contacts at the same account need visibility across shared requests
  • All threads from their company: Broadest visibility, showing everything linked to their company in Plain

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Thread visibility overrides

Overrides are only available when your global thread visibility is set to Only their own threads. They let you grant specific customers broader visibility on top of that default without changing what everyone else can see.

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Threads from anyone with the same tenant

  • Add tenant: Grants all customers belonging to a specific tenant visibility of each other’s threads
  • Add customer: Grants a specific individual customer visibility of all threads from their tenant

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Threads from anyone with the same company

  • Add company: Grants all customers belonging to a specific company visibility of each other’s threads
  • Add customer: Grants a specific individual customer visibility of all threads from their company
This gives account admins elevated visibility without opening it to everyone on the account.

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Additional recipients

You can allow customers to add additional recipients to both new and existing threads from the Customer Inbox. When enabled, customers can CC colleagues into a conversation directly from the portal, useful for keeping multiple stakeholders at an account in the loop. Enable this under Help Center → Customer Inbox → Additional recipients.