Your support portal is a key touchpoint with customers. It's where they go to reach out for help, dig into their requests, and bring visibility to the rest of their team on how they use your product (and how well you're supporting them). Customers directly interact with your team through support portals, and a solid customer experience is pretty much vital.

Support portals work a little differently in Plain compared to other platforms – because we've built them to be headless and fully customizable. Read on to learn about the key differences between pre-built and headless support portals, and why we even took the approach of building headless portals. Hopefully this helps you figure out which approach is right for your team. 

Pre-built portals are great, but they come with some rigid limitations:

A lot of the traditional support platforms (like Zendesk and Intercom) provide ready-made support portals that can be set up quickly, but they come with some limitations. They’re customizable, but generic, and they don’t tightly integrate with your own backend. This leads to a few issues: 

• You don’t control the UI, it clearly looks like a 3rd party solution.

• Your customers have to log into the portal with separate login credentials.

• It’s hard (or impossible, depending on the product) to pull in product specifics. For example if you wanted to offer a dropdown from which users could pick a specific app they’re having issues with, you wouldn’t be able to. 

• It makes deflection based on the specific user’s usage of your product impossible.

• It’s hard to understand who you are talking to without significant effort to link up customers in your support portal with the right team, organization or user in your product.

With all that said, there’s one big benefit for using pre-built support portals – there’s very little engineering work required to get them set up. You just add a link or embed an iframe and you're good to go.

The pros of using a headless support portal

We decided to take a headless approach to support portals, because we believe that you should be able to fully embed support wherever you need to in your product. This can be a game-changer for a few reasons:

• You have control over the frontend of your support portal, so you can make it match your product’s experience and branding.

• Customers can access support directly from your product without the need of a separate set of login credentials. 

• You can use your own data model to ensure that customers are 1 to 1 exactly what they are in your product. Teams in your product can see each others support requests and collaborate with you.

• A headless setup allows you to implement custom logic and automation to address common support scenarios. For example, if a customer reports an issue with a product feature, your portal can automatically check related data and suggest solutions or deflect.

• You can implement custom logic more easily (e.g. show a warning that there is an ongoing incident).

So, what should you choose?

Honestly, it depends on whether you have access to engineers or a technical team. Pre-built portals work really well for basic needs, and teams with little (or no) technical bandwidth – but they’re pretty much guaranteed to bottleneck as your business grows and your support volume scales. Their lack of customizabilty can limit your ability to provide a polished, enjoyable experience for your customers. Importantly, it can also really hurt your support efficiency.

If you’ve got access to an engineering team to build a headless support portal, you’ll unlock a whole new level of customization – with the freedom to build exactly what you need. Control the experience of your customers, and implement workflows that will work for your team (rather than trying to fit the mould of something more rigid). 

Curious about how a headless support portal could work for you? If you’ve got any questions, please reach out through help@plain.com, or book a demo to see what your headless support portal could look like in action. 

For more details on how to build a headless portal, check out our documentation. We’d love to help you set yours up!