Would you rather coordinate a party by texting all your friends individually or taking it to a WhatsApp group? If you don’t want to end up with duplicate desserts and missing mains, you’d probably pick the latter.

The same goes for B2B customer support at scale. There’s no reason to provide support in a silo when you have an option that creates visibility and promotes collaboration across both sides of the customer relationship.

This is exactly what multithreaded support does for B2B companies with sophisticated support workflows. In this educational guide, we’ll dive into the differences between traditional, single-threaded (or one-to-one) support and its multithreaded counterpart, then break down how B2Bs can adopt this potent approach.

The risks of one-to-one support for B2Bs

Single-threaded support follows a one-to-one communications model that unfolds through individual conversations. This is the go-to support structure for B2C companies across industries, which tend to have simpler, more repetitive support interactions.

For instance, if an individual B2C customer needs a refund processed, there’s no need to loop in multiple parties. That would only overcomplicate a straightforward and transactional exchange.

But B2B relationships are anything but straightforward. And when B2B vendors rely on such a simple support model, they run into roadblocks like: 

Messier issue resolution

B2B product issues are often more complicated to resolve. They routinely require involvement from several teams on the vendor side, including support, engineering, and product. And if you’re working with a single-threaded support system, it can be challenging to coordinate all the necessary parties and side conversations without forgetting to close the loop.

Missing customer context

You can’t build a successful B2B relationship without extensive knowledge of your customers. And as the face of the partnership, the sole support rep must work harder to ensure everyone else in their organization has complete customer context — especially when it comes to VIP customers and SLA obligations. This means educating their team on how the customer operates, what they need, and the new product features they’ve been asking for. When support relies on a single point of contact and doesn't involve the broader team, important context can easily get lost along the way.

Too many eggs in one relationship

Things get infinitely more complicated when someone on either side of the relationship leaves. Why? Because when the rep exits, they take the bulk of that meticulously cultivated context — and rapport — with them. Or, should the champion leave, their replacement may not care about the solution at all, and statistically speaking, there’s a 51% chance that they could churn.

In other words, single-threaded support isn’t just a logistical headache; it’s a liability for the entire customer relationship.

And it’s no secret that B2B breakups are much more painful. If the customer does churn, you’re looking at a substantially bigger revenue hit, especially if it’s an enterprise account. Of course, that’s to say nothing of how losing that logo could impact your company’s reputation.

Complex B2B relationships need nuanced, multithreaded support

In contrast, multithreaded support operates on a sturdier, many-to-many communications model. It loops in multiple parties on the vendor and customer sides, including leadership as well as the champion.

This gives everyone a stake in both the relationship and the quality of support operations. The result? Better collaboration on complex tickets, wider customer knowledge, and lower churn risk if a champion or support rep leaves.

Multithreaded support provides the context and long-term relationship-building opportunities that single-threaded support simply lacks. Instead of hinging on a one-to-one connection, it has an entire network of people and touch points to fall back on. That way, the entire partnership isn’t at risk if one chat goes dark — there are plenty of other champions to carry it forward.

And the benefits extend beyond even retention: when everyone has top-level visibility into common customer pain points, it’s easier to align on strategic initiatives, like long-term product roadmaps.

Why teams hesitate to offer multithreaded support

As tempting as multithreaded support sounds, you might be wondering how to deploy such a complex support function as you scale. It can be intimidating at first glance. Teams often hesitate to embrace a multithreaded approach out of worry that:

• With more stakeholders involved on the customer side, their reps will be inundated with requests from every channel — whether it be Slack, email, chat, or Discord.

• Addressing every request collaboratively will create chaos as everything gets rerouted to side conversations.

• Too many cooks in the (support) kitchen will make it harder to delegate and prioritize urgent tickets from VIPs and customers with bugs.

These concerns are valid, but they also have an easy fix: partner with a third-party platform purpose-built for B2B customer support.

Plain and simple: 5 ways to implement multithreaded support at scale

Plain helps B2B teams offer multithreaded support as they grow, without creating chaos or lowering the quality and consistency of their support. By powering your multithreaded approach with Plain, you won’t just be answering tickets but building lasting relationships.

1. Unified inbox for all your channels and performance visibility under one roof

Plain empowers you to meet your customers wherever they want to work, no matter what channel. In fact, it integrates with most support channels, including Slack, Email, Discord, MS Teams, and Chat, in under 30 seconds. That way, you can maintain one inbox for all of them while giving your whole organization oversight of each customer relationship.

Instead of pivoting between tools five times an hour, you can now tackle your full queue from Plain’s sleek, intuitive UI. So, if your switch to a multithreaded model does cause ticket volume to balloon, your team will be able to formulate a unified plan of attack.

And with Plain, everyone gains full visibility into the inner workings — and effectiveness — of your entire support operation. Whether you want to monitor bandwidth, track performance by rep, or see your whole team’s FRT and resolution times, Plain has the answers. Our reports can also inform your long-term product roadmap by surfacing high-level trends in customer issues.

With these insights, your team can strategically optimize the support experience with all hands on deck.

2. Conversation status tracking and team collaboration simplified

Plain also supports multithreaded teams by making it crystal clear who’s responsible for what and when.

The first person to type a response to a request will automatically be assigned to that thread. You also have the power to manually assign threads to multiple users for effortless collaboration and accountability.

Meanwhile, Plain’s statuses (such as “Needs first response” or “Needs next response”) help your team track the progress of each interaction. While statuses will update on their own, you can also intervene to update them manually — like when you want to put a ticket on hold.

But we know your team sometimes needs to collaborate in ways that exceed the linear structure of assignments. Discussions are the ideal way to tag-team on complex customer problems. This feature of our Slack integration lets you link every side Slack conversation to a particular thread or ticket and escalate questions right from Plain. That way, knowledge never disappears into the Slack abyss, and you can quickly escalate requests to your engineering team without friction.

Sound too good to be true? Just ask the high-growth cloud hosting company Fly.io. They use Plain to reduce context-switching and facilitate fast handoffs between members of their engineering team, saving 200 hours per month.

3. Customer context right where you need it

With multiple reps touching every partnership, it can take a while to catch everyone up on your customers’ needs. Fortunately, Plain integrates with your own systems via API to create a customer card with all relevant data. This includes context like plan details, customer history, new features they’ve requested, and product usage information. It doesn’t even matter which channel the customer uses; the intel is always accessible in Plain.

Now, whenever a new team member hops on a ticket, they won’t have to go back and forth with the customer to get to the root of their problem. They can jump straight to impressing them with fast and detailed responses that empathize with their precise pain points.

4. Smart workflows to eliminate busy work

Plain’s AI categorizes and prioritizes your queue so your whole team always knows exactly what you’re dealing with. To start taking advantage of this function, simply create labels for common issues (like “Bug report” or “API question”).

Then, Plain will automatically pull from this repository to label new requests. Our AI will even group similar threads to prevent duplicate work. Plus, it constantly updates each thread with summaries of the contents so you can take in the whole conversation at a glance.

The best part? Plain’s AI generates auto-responses for the customer that you can either take as is or edit to your liking. And since these responses are based on your own help docs and previous responses, you never have to worry that our AI will get carried away.

Lastly, our integrations with Linear, Jira, and Shortcut enable you to link product issues to threads to ensure they always reflect the latest. And anytime a request gets addressed on the engineering side, Plain will remind your rep to close the loop with the customer.

Our AI triaging doesn’t replace your people. It takes the easy stuff off their hands so they can collaborate on the complex work that only humans can do.

5. Tiers to manage SLAs and prioritize VIPs

No need to worry about your VIP customers and SLA obligations getting lost in the multithreaded noise. Plain’s Tiers feature helps you prioritize what (and who) matters most.

You can use it to organize your queue based on support or pricing structure. For instance, you could configure an alert for every time an enterprise customer needs help or whenever an SLA breach occurs. Either way, you’ll never have to worry about dropping the ball.

Take it from Clerk, the leading user management platform. Using Plain’s AI, they automatically map each support request onto the respective customer tier. This makes it easy to roll out the red carpet for enterprises and circle back to their free users in a timely manner. As a result, they keep their promises and nurture the relationships that deliver the most long-term value to their company.

Ready to join the future of B2B support?

Industry leaders like Fly.io, Clerk, Stytch, and Granola use Plain to offer multithreaded support at scale.

See Plain in action by booking a demo today.