Team Reporting

We’ve introduced team reporting – enabling workspace owners and admins to understand the impact that each individual team member is having on their support operations.

Owners and admins of workspaces can now see: 

  • An overview of their whole team performance: including message send count, median first response time, median next response time, median resolution time. 

  • A detail page for each team member where owners and admins can view: message send count, median first response time, median next response time, median resolution time, and threads assigned to each team member. 

Right now, only admins and owners can view team reporting. We’ll launch an update soon that will enable individual team members to drill down into their own performance. 

Team reporting is available on our Grow and Scale plans.

What's new

  • We’ve added a new metric to reporting for: time customers waiting for help. 

  • You can now edit API keys so you don’t have to recreate them every time.

  • You can now 'paste permissions' from your clipboard when editing or creating an API key.

  • You can now filter threads by the API channel:

  • You can now paste a list of emails, like: Tom from Example <tom@example.com>, celia@example.com, “Margaret @ Example Co” <margaret@example.com> into the composer, and we'll correctly parse it and use it for the email you send.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug that caused a customer’s company to re-set when they sent a Slack message in a support channel. Now, the company is permanently set.

  • Linear issue tags in the timeline of a thread now consistently open in a new tab.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Team Reporting

We’ve introduced team reporting – enabling workspace owners and admins to understand the impact that each individual team member is having on their support operations.

Owners and admins of workspaces can now see: 

  • An overview of their whole team performance: including message send count, median first response time, median next response time, median resolution time. 

  • A detail page for each team member where owners and admins can view: message send count, median first response time, median next response time, median resolution time, and threads assigned to each team member. 

Right now, only admins and owners can view team reporting. We’ll launch an update soon that will enable individual team members to drill down into their own performance. 

Team reporting is available on our Grow and Scale plans.

What's new

  • We’ve added a new metric to reporting for: time customers waiting for help. 

  • You can now edit API keys so you don’t have to recreate them every time.

  • You can now 'paste permissions' from your clipboard when editing or creating an API key.

  • You can now filter threads by the API channel:

  • You can now paste a list of emails, like: Tom from Example <tom@example.com>, celia@example.com, “Margaret @ Example Co” <margaret@example.com> into the composer, and we'll correctly parse it and use it for the email you send.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug that caused a customer’s company to re-set when they sent a Slack message in a support channel. Now, the company is permanently set.

  • Linear issue tags in the timeline of a thread now consistently open in a new tab.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Team Reporting

We’ve introduced team reporting – enabling workspace owners and admins to understand the impact that each individual team member is having on their support operations.

Owners and admins of workspaces can now see: 

  • An overview of their whole team performance: including message send count, median first response time, median next response time, median resolution time. 

  • A detail page for each team member where owners and admins can view: message send count, median first response time, median next response time, median resolution time, and threads assigned to each team member. 

Right now, only admins and owners can view team reporting. We’ll launch an update soon that will enable individual team members to drill down into their own performance. 

Team reporting is available on our Grow and Scale plans.

What's new

  • We’ve added a new metric to reporting for: time customers waiting for help. 

  • You can now edit API keys so you don’t have to recreate them every time.

  • You can now 'paste permissions' from your clipboard when editing or creating an API key.

  • You can now filter threads by the API channel:

  • You can now paste a list of emails, like: Tom from Example <tom@example.com>, celia@example.com, “Margaret @ Example Co” <margaret@example.com> into the composer, and we'll correctly parse it and use it for the email you send.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug that caused a customer’s company to re-set when they sent a Slack message in a support channel. Now, the company is permanently set.

  • Linear issue tags in the timeline of a thread now consistently open in a new tab.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

AI-Powered suggested responses

We’ve launched AI-powered suggested responses to help your team reply faster to support requests. These responses are generated using your previous customer conversations in Plain, along with your own docs or knowledge base – so they’re accurate and tailored specifically to your product and workflow. 

AI for B2B support is crucial to get right – it needs to be able to generate responses with the unique context of your product in mind. Our suggested responses speed up the time it takes your team to give detailed and helpful replies to your customers, without losing the human touch. 

When you’re given a suggested response in a thread, you can: 

  • Accept and send exactly as it’s been suggested 

  • Edit the suggested response before sending it to your customer 

  • Discard the suggested response and write your own.

How to get started with suggested responses 
  1. Turn on Plain AI and suggested responses in your workspace

Go to the “Plain AI” settings in your workspace. Toggle “Plain AI” and “Suggested responses” on. Once you’ve enabled both of these features, you’ll start seeing suggested responses in each of your support requests. Check out our docs for more detailed instructions. 

  1. Add your knowledge sources

To give more context and generate better suggested responses – you can add your docs, knowledge base, or any other public URL through the “Knowledge Sources” settings or the Plain CLI. If you skip this step, suggested responses will be generated only using your previous replies. 

Suggested responses are available now for all scale tier customers. If you'd like a demo or are keen to hear about our upcoming AI features, you can book a call with us here.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

AI-Powered suggested responses

We’ve launched AI-powered suggested responses to help your team reply faster to support requests. These responses are generated using your previous customer conversations in Plain, along with your own docs or knowledge base – so they’re accurate and tailored specifically to your product and workflow. 

AI for B2B support is crucial to get right – it needs to be able to generate responses with the unique context of your product in mind. Our suggested responses speed up the time it takes your team to give detailed and helpful replies to your customers, without losing the human touch. 

When you’re given a suggested response in a thread, you can: 

  • Accept and send exactly as it’s been suggested 

  • Edit the suggested response before sending it to your customer 

  • Discard the suggested response and write your own.

How to get started with suggested responses 
  1. Turn on Plain AI and suggested responses in your workspace

Go to the “Plain AI” settings in your workspace. Toggle “Plain AI” and “Suggested responses” on. Once you’ve enabled both of these features, you’ll start seeing suggested responses in each of your support requests. Check out our docs for more detailed instructions. 

  1. Add your knowledge sources

To give more context and generate better suggested responses – you can add your docs, knowledge base, or any other public URL through the “Knowledge Sources” settings or the Plain CLI. If you skip this step, suggested responses will be generated only using your previous replies. 

Suggested responses are available now for all scale tier customers. If you'd like a demo or are keen to hear about our upcoming AI features, you can book a call with us here.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

AI-Powered suggested responses

We’ve launched AI-powered suggested responses to help your team reply faster to support requests. These responses are generated using your previous customer conversations in Plain, along with your own docs or knowledge base – so they’re accurate and tailored specifically to your product and workflow. 

AI for B2B support is crucial to get right – it needs to be able to generate responses with the unique context of your product in mind. Our suggested responses speed up the time it takes your team to give detailed and helpful replies to your customers, without losing the human touch. 

When you’re given a suggested response in a thread, you can: 

  • Accept and send exactly as it’s been suggested 

  • Edit the suggested response before sending it to your customer 

  • Discard the suggested response and write your own.

How to get started with suggested responses 
  1. Turn on Plain AI and suggested responses in your workspace

Go to the “Plain AI” settings in your workspace. Toggle “Plain AI” and “Suggested responses” on. Once you’ve enabled both of these features, you’ll start seeing suggested responses in each of your support requests. Check out our docs for more detailed instructions. 

  1. Add your knowledge sources

To give more context and generate better suggested responses – you can add your docs, knowledge base, or any other public URL through the “Knowledge Sources” settings or the Plain CLI. If you skip this step, suggested responses will be generated only using your previous replies. 

Suggested responses are available now for all scale tier customers. If you'd like a demo or are keen to hear about our upcoming AI features, you can book a call with us here.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Updates to Chat

Since announcing our live chat beta last month, we’ve made some significant updates – greatly improving the functionality of live chat, and improving your team’s workflow when triaging and answering questions you’ve received through chat. 

Image showing live chat in Plain
Customer identification 

You can now specify customer details such as their name and avatar when a support request is received.

You can also provide an email address which can link them to an existing customer in Plain, reducing the amount of back-and-forth you need to do with customers. You’ll need to authenticate this email address to ensure you’re speaking to the actual customer. You can learn more about setting up authentication in our docs

Enhance your chat triaging with Plain’s data model

You can add labels, tiers and tenants on the creation of a new chat session. For example, you could have a label for each section of your site so it’s clear where the customer has submitted the support request from. 

Additional customization of your chat widget 

We’ve introduced some new customization options to the chat widget including:

  • Brand color: specify a color that will be used in various places throughout the chat widget – ensuring that it matches the UI and branding of your own product, regardless of where you need to add chat. You can introduce a different color for light/dark mode. 

  • Embedding: choose if/where the chat application is shown in your page. This enables completely new user experiences such as a popup, or even entirely embedded in your own page(s).

  • Logo: add your logo so the widget matches your own branding. 

  • Entry point: decide if you want to skip the welcome screen entirely – letting your customers jump straight into a chat session.

  • Chat buttons: customize and add additional chat buttons each (e.g. “Report a bug”, or “Get support”) with their own icon and text. These can even apply different labels, tiers and tenants – making it easier to triage questions that come through your chat.

Chat forms

Similar to chat buttons, you can provide a dropdown (more form controls to come later) when a user creates a new chat session, which can set the previously mentioned Plain data model attributes. 

Unread message emails 

Your customers will now receive emails when they’ve got an unread chat message from you – ensuring that if they leave the page they started the chat on, they’ll get a response and continue the conversation with you. 

Added chat to workflow rules 

You can now set workflow rules actions to trigger once you receive a request through chat. Automatically set a tier, add labels, set priority, assign to a specific user and more when you receive a chat. 

Introduced auto-responses for chat 

With auto-responses you can set expectations immediately about your response times when a customer reaches out through your chat widget. Auto-responses can be conditional, using tiers, labels and business hours to inform the content of your auto-response. 

To add these new features or get started with chat – check out our documentation

What's new

  • We've shipped support for changing the customer on a thread.

  • You can now change the auto-assignment behaviour for messages coming from Slack and MS Teams.

  • You can now see your per role counts at the top of your member page.

Improvements

  • You can now set the tier of a thread with workflow rules.

  • Labels can now be added to thread fields.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

David Leyland

Engineering

Updates to Chat

Since announcing our live chat beta last month, we’ve made some significant updates – greatly improving the functionality of live chat, and improving your team’s workflow when triaging and answering questions you’ve received through chat. 

Image showing live chat in Plain
Customer identification 

You can now specify customer details such as their name and avatar when a support request is received.

You can also provide an email address which can link them to an existing customer in Plain, reducing the amount of back-and-forth you need to do with customers. You’ll need to authenticate this email address to ensure you’re speaking to the actual customer. You can learn more about setting up authentication in our docs

Enhance your chat triaging with Plain’s data model

You can add labels, tiers and tenants on the creation of a new chat session. For example, you could have a label for each section of your site so it’s clear where the customer has submitted the support request from. 

Additional customization of your chat widget 

We’ve introduced some new customization options to the chat widget including:

  • Brand color: specify a color that will be used in various places throughout the chat widget – ensuring that it matches the UI and branding of your own product, regardless of where you need to add chat. You can introduce a different color for light/dark mode. 

  • Embedding: choose if/where the chat application is shown in your page. This enables completely new user experiences such as a popup, or even entirely embedded in your own page(s).

  • Logo: add your logo so the widget matches your own branding. 

  • Entry point: decide if you want to skip the welcome screen entirely – letting your customers jump straight into a chat session.

  • Chat buttons: customize and add additional chat buttons each (e.g. “Report a bug”, or “Get support”) with their own icon and text. These can even apply different labels, tiers and tenants – making it easier to triage questions that come through your chat.

Chat forms

Similar to chat buttons, you can provide a dropdown (more form controls to come later) when a user creates a new chat session, which can set the previously mentioned Plain data model attributes. 

Unread message emails 

Your customers will now receive emails when they’ve got an unread chat message from you – ensuring that if they leave the page they started the chat on, they’ll get a response and continue the conversation with you. 

Added chat to workflow rules 

You can now set workflow rules actions to trigger once you receive a request through chat. Automatically set a tier, add labels, set priority, assign to a specific user and more when you receive a chat. 

Introduced auto-responses for chat 

With auto-responses you can set expectations immediately about your response times when a customer reaches out through your chat widget. Auto-responses can be conditional, using tiers, labels and business hours to inform the content of your auto-response. 

To add these new features or get started with chat – check out our documentation

What's new

  • We've shipped support for changing the customer on a thread.

  • You can now change the auto-assignment behaviour for messages coming from Slack and MS Teams.

  • You can now see your per role counts at the top of your member page.

Improvements

  • You can now set the tier of a thread with workflow rules.

  • Labels can now be added to thread fields.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

David Leyland

Engineering

Updates to Chat

Since announcing our live chat beta last month, we’ve made some significant updates – greatly improving the functionality of live chat, and improving your team’s workflow when triaging and answering questions you’ve received through chat. 

Image showing live chat in Plain
Customer identification 

You can now specify customer details such as their name and avatar when a support request is received.

You can also provide an email address which can link them to an existing customer in Plain, reducing the amount of back-and-forth you need to do with customers. You’ll need to authenticate this email address to ensure you’re speaking to the actual customer. You can learn more about setting up authentication in our docs

Enhance your chat triaging with Plain’s data model

You can add labels, tiers and tenants on the creation of a new chat session. For example, you could have a label for each section of your site so it’s clear where the customer has submitted the support request from. 

Additional customization of your chat widget 

We’ve introduced some new customization options to the chat widget including:

  • Brand color: specify a color that will be used in various places throughout the chat widget – ensuring that it matches the UI and branding of your own product, regardless of where you need to add chat. You can introduce a different color for light/dark mode. 

  • Embedding: choose if/where the chat application is shown in your page. This enables completely new user experiences such as a popup, or even entirely embedded in your own page(s).

  • Logo: add your logo so the widget matches your own branding. 

  • Entry point: decide if you want to skip the welcome screen entirely – letting your customers jump straight into a chat session.

  • Chat buttons: customize and add additional chat buttons each (e.g. “Report a bug”, or “Get support”) with their own icon and text. These can even apply different labels, tiers and tenants – making it easier to triage questions that come through your chat.

Chat forms

Similar to chat buttons, you can provide a dropdown (more form controls to come later) when a user creates a new chat session, which can set the previously mentioned Plain data model attributes. 

Unread message emails 

Your customers will now receive emails when they’ve got an unread chat message from you – ensuring that if they leave the page they started the chat on, they’ll get a response and continue the conversation with you. 

Added chat to workflow rules 

You can now set workflow rules actions to trigger once you receive a request through chat. Automatically set a tier, add labels, set priority, assign to a specific user and more when you receive a chat. 

Introduced auto-responses for chat 

With auto-responses you can set expectations immediately about your response times when a customer reaches out through your chat widget. Auto-responses can be conditional, using tiers, labels and business hours to inform the content of your auto-response. 

To add these new features or get started with chat – check out our documentation

What's new

  • We've shipped support for changing the customer on a thread.

  • You can now change the auto-assignment behaviour for messages coming from Slack and MS Teams.

  • You can now see your per role counts at the top of your member page.

Improvements

  • You can now set the tier of a thread with workflow rules.

  • Labels can now be added to thread fields.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

David Leyland

Engineering

New AI settings page

To prepare for the launch of some new AI features, we’ve just added a new “Plain AI” page to your workspace settings. The new settings page contains a top-level opt-in to AI for your workspace. 

The new settings page now contains toggles for Smart AI replies (currently in beta – let us know if you’d like to try it), auto-labeling, thread summaries, and thread titles.  

AI ingestion still lives within your Slack settings, and you can still choose to autofill your thread fields with AI in your thread fields settings. Note: you’ll be directed to the Plain AI settings page to enable AI for your workspace if these are not currently active.

All your AI settings have been preserved across the board with this update – e.g. If you had AI ingestion or auto-labeling turned on, they’re still turned on. 

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

New AI settings page

To prepare for the launch of some new AI features, we’ve just added a new “Plain AI” page to your workspace settings. The new settings page contains a top-level opt-in to AI for your workspace. 

The new settings page now contains toggles for Smart AI replies (currently in beta – let us know if you’d like to try it), auto-labeling, thread summaries, and thread titles.  

AI ingestion still lives within your Slack settings, and you can still choose to autofill your thread fields with AI in your thread fields settings. Note: you’ll be directed to the Plain AI settings page to enable AI for your workspace if these are not currently active.

All your AI settings have been preserved across the board with this update – e.g. If you had AI ingestion or auto-labeling turned on, they’re still turned on. 

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

New AI settings page

To prepare for the launch of some new AI features, we’ve just added a new “Plain AI” page to your workspace settings. The new settings page contains a top-level opt-in to AI for your workspace. 

The new settings page now contains toggles for Smart AI replies (currently in beta – let us know if you’d like to try it), auto-labeling, thread summaries, and thread titles.  

AI ingestion still lives within your Slack settings, and you can still choose to autofill your thread fields with AI in your thread fields settings. Note: you’ll be directed to the Plain AI settings page to enable AI for your workspace if these are not currently active.

All your AI settings have been preserved across the board with this update – e.g. If you had AI ingestion or auto-labeling turned on, they’re still turned on. 

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Redesigned Sidebar

Changelog hero image

As we’ve added more features to your sidebar – like thread links, recent threads, and discussions – it’s become a bit cluttered and hard to focus on the information you need. For this reason, we’re launching a redesigned sidebar, so you have more control over the information you see in each thread. 

You’ll notice a new toggle that allows you to switch between thread details and customer cards. A big piece of feedback we received that informed this redesign is that customer cards are shown too far down the sidebar. Now you can simply toggle between the two views – either by clicking on the view you want, or using CMD+1, CMD+2 keyboard shortcuts.

What each toggle contains: 

Thread details

The thread details view will show you all the information you’re used to. See who the customer is, the company they belong to, associated tiers, SLAs, and labels. You can also start discussions with your team, and link threads to Linear, Jira, or other threads as you’ve always done. 

Customer cards

Customer cards are a really powerful feature that allow you to show information from your own systems directly inside your support requests. With this update, you can view them when you need to get more context on how the customer is using your product to help you troubleshoot their issues. Keep important information at your fingertips, without having to switch between endless tabs.

What's new

  • You can now set the tier of a thread as a workflow rule action 

  • You can now add labels to thread fields

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Redesigned Sidebar

Changelog hero image

As we’ve added more features to your sidebar – like thread links, recent threads, and discussions – it’s become a bit cluttered and hard to focus on the information you need. For this reason, we’re launching a redesigned sidebar, so you have more control over the information you see in each thread. 

You’ll notice a new toggle that allows you to switch between thread details and customer cards. A big piece of feedback we received that informed this redesign is that customer cards are shown too far down the sidebar. Now you can simply toggle between the two views – either by clicking on the view you want, or using CMD+1, CMD+2 keyboard shortcuts.

What each toggle contains: 

Thread details

The thread details view will show you all the information you’re used to. See who the customer is, the company they belong to, associated tiers, SLAs, and labels. You can also start discussions with your team, and link threads to Linear, Jira, or other threads as you’ve always done. 

Customer cards

Customer cards are a really powerful feature that allow you to show information from your own systems directly inside your support requests. With this update, you can view them when you need to get more context on how the customer is using your product to help you troubleshoot their issues. Keep important information at your fingertips, without having to switch between endless tabs.

What's new

  • You can now set the tier of a thread as a workflow rule action 

  • You can now add labels to thread fields

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Redesigned Sidebar

Changelog hero image

As we’ve added more features to your sidebar – like thread links, recent threads, and discussions – it’s become a bit cluttered and hard to focus on the information you need. For this reason, we’re launching a redesigned sidebar, so you have more control over the information you see in each thread. 

You’ll notice a new toggle that allows you to switch between thread details and customer cards. A big piece of feedback we received that informed this redesign is that customer cards are shown too far down the sidebar. Now you can simply toggle between the two views – either by clicking on the view you want, or using CMD+1, CMD+2 keyboard shortcuts.

What each toggle contains: 

Thread details

The thread details view will show you all the information you’re used to. See who the customer is, the company they belong to, associated tiers, SLAs, and labels. You can also start discussions with your team, and link threads to Linear, Jira, or other threads as you’ve always done. 

Customer cards

Customer cards are a really powerful feature that allow you to show information from your own systems directly inside your support requests. With this update, you can view them when you need to get more context on how the customer is using your product to help you troubleshoot their issues. Keep important information at your fingertips, without having to switch between endless tabs.

What's new

  • You can now set the tier of a thread as a workflow rule action 

  • You can now add labels to thread fields

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Jira integration

We’re really excited to announce our Jira integration – now available on all plans. With this integration, you can create and link new issues in Jira straight from a customer request you’ve received in Plain. Jira issues can be linked from support requests received through any of your support channels.

Changelog hero image

The Jira integration will work very similarly to our Linear integration – easily log issues, bugs, and feature requests to Jira, and close the loop with your customers when the issue is marked as done in Jira. 

To link Jira to Plain, just follow the instructions in our docs – it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to get set up. 

Once you’ve linked Jira to Plain, you can start linking and creating issues from support requests – speeding up your support workflow and improving collaboration between your support and engineering teams.

What you’ll be able to do: 

  • To link a customer request directly to a Jira issue – hit “Thread links” in your thread sidebar (keyboard shortcut: I), and choose “Link Jira issue”. 

  • You can then choose to add the customer request to an existing Jira issue, or create a new one 

  • If you’re creating a new Jira issue, we’ll auto-fill the description of the issue based on the content of the support request to speed up the process for you. 

  • When a Jira issue is marked as done, any threads linked to the Jira issue will automatically pop back into your Todo list – so you can update your customers on the fix. 

New: Thread Links

Alongside our Jira integration, we’ve also released thread links – a new feature that allows you to link threads to one another. Once you mark one linked thread as done, all linked threads will move to close the loop, so you can respond to customers faster and more consistently. 

To link a thread to others, just hit “Thread links” in your thread sidebar (keyboard shortcut: I). From here, you can link multiple threads to each other, Jira issues, and Linear issues. 

Designed, built and written by

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Jesús Hernández

Engineering

Jira integration

We’re really excited to announce our Jira integration – now available on all plans. With this integration, you can create and link new issues in Jira straight from a customer request you’ve received in Plain. Jira issues can be linked from support requests received through any of your support channels.

Changelog hero image

The Jira integration will work very similarly to our Linear integration – easily log issues, bugs, and feature requests to Jira, and close the loop with your customers when the issue is marked as done in Jira. 

To link Jira to Plain, just follow the instructions in our docs – it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to get set up. 

Once you’ve linked Jira to Plain, you can start linking and creating issues from support requests – speeding up your support workflow and improving collaboration between your support and engineering teams.

What you’ll be able to do: 

  • To link a customer request directly to a Jira issue – hit “Thread links” in your thread sidebar (keyboard shortcut: I), and choose “Link Jira issue”. 

  • You can then choose to add the customer request to an existing Jira issue, or create a new one 

  • If you’re creating a new Jira issue, we’ll auto-fill the description of the issue based on the content of the support request to speed up the process for you. 

  • When a Jira issue is marked as done, any threads linked to the Jira issue will automatically pop back into your Todo list – so you can update your customers on the fix. 

New: Thread Links

Alongside our Jira integration, we’ve also released thread links – a new feature that allows you to link threads to one another. Once you mark one linked thread as done, all linked threads will move to close the loop, so you can respond to customers faster and more consistently. 

To link a thread to others, just hit “Thread links” in your thread sidebar (keyboard shortcut: I). From here, you can link multiple threads to each other, Jira issues, and Linear issues. 

Designed, built and written by

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Jesús Hernández

Engineering

Jira integration

We’re really excited to announce our Jira integration – now available on all plans. With this integration, you can create and link new issues in Jira straight from a customer request you’ve received in Plain. Jira issues can be linked from support requests received through any of your support channels.

Changelog hero image

The Jira integration will work very similarly to our Linear integration – easily log issues, bugs, and feature requests to Jira, and close the loop with your customers when the issue is marked as done in Jira. 

To link Jira to Plain, just follow the instructions in our docs – it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to get set up. 

Once you’ve linked Jira to Plain, you can start linking and creating issues from support requests – speeding up your support workflow and improving collaboration between your support and engineering teams.

What you’ll be able to do: 

  • To link a customer request directly to a Jira issue – hit “Thread links” in your thread sidebar (keyboard shortcut: I), and choose “Link Jira issue”. 

  • You can then choose to add the customer request to an existing Jira issue, or create a new one 

  • If you’re creating a new Jira issue, we’ll auto-fill the description of the issue based on the content of the support request to speed up the process for you. 

  • When a Jira issue is marked as done, any threads linked to the Jira issue will automatically pop back into your Todo list – so you can update your customers on the fix. 

New: Thread Links

Alongside our Jira integration, we’ve also released thread links – a new feature that allows you to link threads to one another. Once you mark one linked thread as done, all linked threads will move to close the loop, so you can respond to customers faster and more consistently. 

To link a thread to others, just hit “Thread links” in your thread sidebar (keyboard shortcut: I). From here, you can link multiple threads to each other, Jira issues, and Linear issues. 

Designed, built and written by

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Jesús Hernández

Engineering

Update to Slack Digests

Changelog hero image

Last month, we released Slack Digests – giving you daily insights into your Plain account activity delivered to Slack every weekday.

We received some feedback that different members of your team need to know different things about the state of your support queue, so we’ve decided to make some updates. 

You can now choose between 2 different digests (or use both) – to ensure the right people on your team have the correct overview of the information they need to know about your support queue at a glance. 

Daily Standup   

The new Daily Standup Digest is an updated version of our original digest. It aims to give you a brief, cohesive overview of your outstanding threads in “Todo”, and tags the members of your team that have threads assigned to them. 

This Digest is tailored towards the members of your team who are actively responding to support requests – we recommend using it in the mornings so you get a quick overview first thing about the threads that need to be actioned. 

Daily Summary  

The Daily Summary Digest is a brand new digest, aimed at giving you a high-level view into the health of your support queue. Threads that need high priority actions will be listed here – e.g. threads that have breached or are about to breach their SLAs, and threads that have been waiting for action for a long time. 

This Digest will be useful for Heads of Support, or team members who mightn’t be in the support weeds every day, but need to know about the high-level state of your support queue. We recommend turning it on at the end of the day so you get an idea of how your support team has performed throughout the day.

Check out our docs for more information on Slack Digests, and instructions on how to set them up.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Update to Slack Digests

Changelog hero image

Last month, we released Slack Digests – giving you daily insights into your Plain account activity delivered to Slack every weekday.

We received some feedback that different members of your team need to know different things about the state of your support queue, so we’ve decided to make some updates. 

You can now choose between 2 different digests (or use both) – to ensure the right people on your team have the correct overview of the information they need to know about your support queue at a glance. 

Daily Standup   

The new Daily Standup Digest is an updated version of our original digest. It aims to give you a brief, cohesive overview of your outstanding threads in “Todo”, and tags the members of your team that have threads assigned to them. 

This Digest is tailored towards the members of your team who are actively responding to support requests – we recommend using it in the mornings so you get a quick overview first thing about the threads that need to be actioned. 

Daily Summary  

The Daily Summary Digest is a brand new digest, aimed at giving you a high-level view into the health of your support queue. Threads that need high priority actions will be listed here – e.g. threads that have breached or are about to breach their SLAs, and threads that have been waiting for action for a long time. 

This Digest will be useful for Heads of Support, or team members who mightn’t be in the support weeds every day, but need to know about the high-level state of your support queue. We recommend turning it on at the end of the day so you get an idea of how your support team has performed throughout the day.

Check out our docs for more information on Slack Digests, and instructions on how to set them up.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Update to Slack Digests

Changelog hero image

Last month, we released Slack Digests – giving you daily insights into your Plain account activity delivered to Slack every weekday.

We received some feedback that different members of your team need to know different things about the state of your support queue, so we’ve decided to make some updates. 

You can now choose between 2 different digests (or use both) – to ensure the right people on your team have the correct overview of the information they need to know about your support queue at a glance. 

Daily Standup   

The new Daily Standup Digest is an updated version of our original digest. It aims to give you a brief, cohesive overview of your outstanding threads in “Todo”, and tags the members of your team that have threads assigned to them. 

This Digest is tailored towards the members of your team who are actively responding to support requests – we recommend using it in the mornings so you get a quick overview first thing about the threads that need to be actioned. 

Daily Summary  

The Daily Summary Digest is a brand new digest, aimed at giving you a high-level view into the health of your support queue. Threads that need high priority actions will be listed here – e.g. threads that have breached or are about to breach their SLAs, and threads that have been waiting for action for a long time. 

This Digest will be useful for Heads of Support, or team members who mightn’t be in the support weeds every day, but need to know about the high-level state of your support queue. We recommend turning it on at the end of the day so you get an idea of how your support team has performed throughout the day.

Check out our docs for more information on Slack Digests, and instructions on how to set them up.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Multiple assignees

Changelog hero image

We’ve launched multiple assignees, giving you the ability to add a lead assignee and co-assignees to threads. This was a highly-requested feature from lots of our existing customers – and it gives you the ability to collaborate better than before on support requests. 

Why is this useful? 

Improved collaboration 
Need to pull an engineer into a support request? Co-assign them so they get notified about updates, and so you can continue to keep track of the thread while they’re working on a fix. 

Clearer ownership of threads 
Are handovers and communication unclear between sales, success, and support? Assign a lead to the owner of the request, and make sure the relevant team members have continued visibility. 

Faster response times 
Clearer assignment = faster response times for your customers. Make sure the team that needs to help on a request is assigned from the get-go, and resolve issues faster than before. 

Notifications for co-assignees will work exactly the same as assignees – you’ll get the same notification if you’re assigned as a lead or co-assignee. 

Any thread you are assigned or co-assigned to will appear as usual in your “your threads” queue. The view sorting isn’t dependent on whether you’re a lead or not – it’ll only depend on the sorting (e.g. priority) you’ve chosen. 

Co-assignees are available now on all plans – let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

What's new

  • You can now use labels as a condition for auto-responses

  • Shipped the ability to view attachment previews in threads 

  • You can now link a Company to a Slack channel 

  • Introduced “Chat” as a new support channel condition for workflow rules 

  • Introduced the ability to add a note as a workflow rule action

  • Auto-responses are now available for chat 

  • You can now also add a customer to a customer group as a rule action

  • Introduced a new Tenant page

Improvements

  • The Slack notification thread status is now a dropdown (instead of a button) 

  • Discussions now has a keyboard shortcut – just hit “D” to start a Discussion on a thread

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Multiple assignees

Changelog hero image

We’ve launched multiple assignees, giving you the ability to add a lead assignee and co-assignees to threads. This was a highly-requested feature from lots of our existing customers – and it gives you the ability to collaborate better than before on support requests. 

Why is this useful? 

Improved collaboration 
Need to pull an engineer into a support request? Co-assign them so they get notified about updates, and so you can continue to keep track of the thread while they’re working on a fix. 

Clearer ownership of threads 
Are handovers and communication unclear between sales, success, and support? Assign a lead to the owner of the request, and make sure the relevant team members have continued visibility. 

Faster response times 
Clearer assignment = faster response times for your customers. Make sure the team that needs to help on a request is assigned from the get-go, and resolve issues faster than before. 

Notifications for co-assignees will work exactly the same as assignees – you’ll get the same notification if you’re assigned as a lead or co-assignee. 

Any thread you are assigned or co-assigned to will appear as usual in your “your threads” queue. The view sorting isn’t dependent on whether you’re a lead or not – it’ll only depend on the sorting (e.g. priority) you’ve chosen. 

Co-assignees are available now on all plans – let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

What's new

  • You can now use labels as a condition for auto-responses

  • Shipped the ability to view attachment previews in threads 

  • You can now link a Company to a Slack channel 

  • Introduced “Chat” as a new support channel condition for workflow rules 

  • Introduced the ability to add a note as a workflow rule action

  • Auto-responses are now available for chat 

  • You can now also add a customer to a customer group as a rule action

  • Introduced a new Tenant page

Improvements

  • The Slack notification thread status is now a dropdown (instead of a button) 

  • Discussions now has a keyboard shortcut – just hit “D” to start a Discussion on a thread

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Multiple assignees

Changelog hero image

We’ve launched multiple assignees, giving you the ability to add a lead assignee and co-assignees to threads. This was a highly-requested feature from lots of our existing customers – and it gives you the ability to collaborate better than before on support requests. 

Why is this useful? 

Improved collaboration 
Need to pull an engineer into a support request? Co-assign them so they get notified about updates, and so you can continue to keep track of the thread while they’re working on a fix. 

Clearer ownership of threads 
Are handovers and communication unclear between sales, success, and support? Assign a lead to the owner of the request, and make sure the relevant team members have continued visibility. 

Faster response times 
Clearer assignment = faster response times for your customers. Make sure the team that needs to help on a request is assigned from the get-go, and resolve issues faster than before. 

Notifications for co-assignees will work exactly the same as assignees – you’ll get the same notification if you’re assigned as a lead or co-assignee. 

Any thread you are assigned or co-assigned to will appear as usual in your “your threads” queue. The view sorting isn’t dependent on whether you’re a lead or not – it’ll only depend on the sorting (e.g. priority) you’ve chosen. 

Co-assignees are available now on all plans – let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

What's new

  • You can now use labels as a condition for auto-responses

  • Shipped the ability to view attachment previews in threads 

  • You can now link a Company to a Slack channel 

  • Introduced “Chat” as a new support channel condition for workflow rules 

  • Introduced the ability to add a note as a workflow rule action

  • Auto-responses are now available for chat 

  • You can now also add a customer to a customer group as a rule action

  • Introduced a new Tenant page

Improvements

  • The Slack notification thread status is now a dropdown (instead of a button) 

  • Discussions now has a keyboard shortcut – just hit “D” to start a Discussion on a thread

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Product insights

We're really excited to announce the first in a number of features we'll be launching to help you prioritize and understand customer feedback and feature requests – driven by your own customer data.

Today we are launching a new product insights page where you can see all of your customer requests and feedback.

Image showing Linear issues page

To check it out go to "Product insights" from your left hand sidebar.

Here you will see every Linear issue ranked by the number of support requests associated with it. For every Linear issue, you can now also see the linked companies as well as tier breakdown to help you prioritize your backlog.

Clicking on any request shows even deeper insights, including which customers have asked for the feature, the request breakdown by tier, and all related threads that contain the customer requests.

Image showing drilldown into individual issues

What's new

  • Introduced a new Tier page where you can view total threads per tier, companies in each Tier, and the total support volume per Tier

Improvements

  • You can now view the total volume on support volume and dimensions in Insights

Bug fixes

  • We now correctly transform arbitrarly nested markdown lists into Slack's own markdown flavour

  • Fixed a bug that prevented you from using the shortcuts to reply when in the "new email" subject field

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Product insights

We're really excited to announce the first in a number of features we'll be launching to help you prioritize and understand customer feedback and feature requests – driven by your own customer data.

Today we are launching a new product insights page where you can see all of your customer requests and feedback.

Image showing Linear issues page

To check it out go to "Product insights" from your left hand sidebar.

Here you will see every Linear issue ranked by the number of support requests associated with it. For every Linear issue, you can now also see the linked companies as well as tier breakdown to help you prioritize your backlog.

Clicking on any request shows even deeper insights, including which customers have asked for the feature, the request breakdown by tier, and all related threads that contain the customer requests.

Image showing drilldown into individual issues

What's new

  • Introduced a new Tier page where you can view total threads per tier, companies in each Tier, and the total support volume per Tier

Improvements

  • You can now view the total volume on support volume and dimensions in Insights

Bug fixes

  • We now correctly transform arbitrarly nested markdown lists into Slack's own markdown flavour

  • Fixed a bug that prevented you from using the shortcuts to reply when in the "new email" subject field

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Product insights

We're really excited to announce the first in a number of features we'll be launching to help you prioritize and understand customer feedback and feature requests – driven by your own customer data.

Today we are launching a new product insights page where you can see all of your customer requests and feedback.

Image showing Linear issues page

To check it out go to "Product insights" from your left hand sidebar.

Here you will see every Linear issue ranked by the number of support requests associated with it. For every Linear issue, you can now also see the linked companies as well as tier breakdown to help you prioritize your backlog.

Clicking on any request shows even deeper insights, including which customers have asked for the feature, the request breakdown by tier, and all related threads that contain the customer requests.

Image showing drilldown into individual issues

What's new

  • Introduced a new Tier page where you can view total threads per tier, companies in each Tier, and the total support volume per Tier

Improvements

  • You can now view the total volume on support volume and dimensions in Insights

Bug fixes

  • We now correctly transform arbitrarly nested markdown lists into Slack's own markdown flavour

  • Fixed a bug that prevented you from using the shortcuts to reply when in the "new email" subject field

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Live chat beta

Changelog hero image

We’re really excited to announce the beta release of our newest support channel for Plain: live chat. 

With our live chat widget, your customers can reach out to you without leaving your site or app – and you can respond to these messages directly in Plain. Live chat is traditionally quite a “separate” experience from the rest of your support channels – we want to change that and make chat feel native to your product. 

What’s available in beta? 

Unauthenticated live chat 
Our beta release of live chat includes unauthenticated chat only – meaning you’ll need to respond to each customer request to get their details. 

One live chat interface per workspace 
Right now, only one chat interface is available for each workspace. As we continue to iterate on chat over the next few weeks, we’ll allow multiple configurations. 

Start customizing your chat experience 
We’re launching chat beta with limited customization experience – as of today, you’re able to customize your chat widget to include your brand color. We’ll be constantly iterating on this over the next few weeks to give you more control over the behaviour the appearance of your chat widget(s).

When will the next version of chat be available? 

We’re planning to launch authenticated chat next week, with more customization options and auto-responders to fast-follow. If you’d like to try the beta version, check out the instructions below if you’re a current Plain customer. If you’re not using Plain yet and want to take our chat beta for a spin – book your onboarding session today. We’d love to show you around. 

How to add chat to your workspace: 

To turn chat beta on in your workspace, head to your workspace Settings → Chat. After creating your chat app, you will be provided with a snippet of code that you can embed in your website or app. This will add the chat widget to your site. We recommend adding this to all pages of your site. View full instructions in our docs.

What's new

  • We shipped mTLS support for all our outgoing http requests. Namely: webhooks and customer cards. This is enabled by default for all workspaces, and documented here.

Improvements

  • Insights page now has a global date picker + it's persistent, so if you drill down it will keep the date range you've set.

  • We’ve updated the “Company” page, so you can see all threads from each customer individually and assign a tier to a company. 

  • We’ve updated the “Companies” page so you can now create a new company from there. 

  • We now disable the "Next" button if you are on the last thread in the queue.

  • You now have custom snooze durations in cmd+k.

  • You can use the snooze shortcut when the sidebar is closed.

  • Dragging a thread into 'paused for later' in kanban view.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug with dark mode colors when you are using the arrows so you can now actually see what you've selected.

  • Fixed a bug where volume breakdown didn't show data when selecting 120 days.

  • Fixed a bug where you select a custom date of just one day and it would show "Today" in the x-axis instead of the date selected.

  • Fixed a bug where if you selected one day in the custom field it would not show data and it would show the wrong date in the x-axis.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Live chat beta

Changelog hero image

We’re really excited to announce the beta release of our newest support channel for Plain: live chat. 

With our live chat widget, your customers can reach out to you without leaving your site or app – and you can respond to these messages directly in Plain. Live chat is traditionally quite a “separate” experience from the rest of your support channels – we want to change that and make chat feel native to your product. 

What’s available in beta? 

Unauthenticated live chat 
Our beta release of live chat includes unauthenticated chat only – meaning you’ll need to respond to each customer request to get their details. 

One live chat interface per workspace 
Right now, only one chat interface is available for each workspace. As we continue to iterate on chat over the next few weeks, we’ll allow multiple configurations. 

Start customizing your chat experience 
We’re launching chat beta with limited customization experience – as of today, you’re able to customize your chat widget to include your brand color. We’ll be constantly iterating on this over the next few weeks to give you more control over the behaviour the appearance of your chat widget(s).

When will the next version of chat be available? 

We’re planning to launch authenticated chat next week, with more customization options and auto-responders to fast-follow. If you’d like to try the beta version, check out the instructions below if you’re a current Plain customer. If you’re not using Plain yet and want to take our chat beta for a spin – book your onboarding session today. We’d love to show you around. 

How to add chat to your workspace: 

To turn chat beta on in your workspace, head to your workspace Settings → Chat. After creating your chat app, you will be provided with a snippet of code that you can embed in your website or app. This will add the chat widget to your site. We recommend adding this to all pages of your site. View full instructions in our docs.

What's new

  • We shipped mTLS support for all our outgoing http requests. Namely: webhooks and customer cards. This is enabled by default for all workspaces, and documented here.

Improvements

  • Insights page now has a global date picker + it's persistent, so if you drill down it will keep the date range you've set.

  • We’ve updated the “Company” page, so you can see all threads from each customer individually and assign a tier to a company. 

  • We’ve updated the “Companies” page so you can now create a new company from there. 

  • We now disable the "Next" button if you are on the last thread in the queue.

  • You now have custom snooze durations in cmd+k.

  • You can use the snooze shortcut when the sidebar is closed.

  • Dragging a thread into 'paused for later' in kanban view.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug with dark mode colors when you are using the arrows so you can now actually see what you've selected.

  • Fixed a bug where volume breakdown didn't show data when selecting 120 days.

  • Fixed a bug where you select a custom date of just one day and it would show "Today" in the x-axis instead of the date selected.

  • Fixed a bug where if you selected one day in the custom field it would not show data and it would show the wrong date in the x-axis.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Live chat beta

Changelog hero image

We’re really excited to announce the beta release of our newest support channel for Plain: live chat. 

With our live chat widget, your customers can reach out to you without leaving your site or app – and you can respond to these messages directly in Plain. Live chat is traditionally quite a “separate” experience from the rest of your support channels – we want to change that and make chat feel native to your product. 

What’s available in beta? 

Unauthenticated live chat 
Our beta release of live chat includes unauthenticated chat only – meaning you’ll need to respond to each customer request to get their details. 

One live chat interface per workspace 
Right now, only one chat interface is available for each workspace. As we continue to iterate on chat over the next few weeks, we’ll allow multiple configurations. 

Start customizing your chat experience 
We’re launching chat beta with limited customization experience – as of today, you’re able to customize your chat widget to include your brand color. We’ll be constantly iterating on this over the next few weeks to give you more control over the behaviour the appearance of your chat widget(s).

When will the next version of chat be available? 

We’re planning to launch authenticated chat next week, with more customization options and auto-responders to fast-follow. If you’d like to try the beta version, check out the instructions below if you’re a current Plain customer. If you’re not using Plain yet and want to take our chat beta for a spin – book your onboarding session today. We’d love to show you around. 

How to add chat to your workspace: 

To turn chat beta on in your workspace, head to your workspace Settings → Chat. After creating your chat app, you will be provided with a snippet of code that you can embed in your website or app. This will add the chat widget to your site. We recommend adding this to all pages of your site. View full instructions in our docs.

What's new

  • We shipped mTLS support for all our outgoing http requests. Namely: webhooks and customer cards. This is enabled by default for all workspaces, and documented here.

Improvements

  • Insights page now has a global date picker + it's persistent, so if you drill down it will keep the date range you've set.

  • We’ve updated the “Company” page, so you can see all threads from each customer individually and assign a tier to a company. 

  • We’ve updated the “Companies” page so you can now create a new company from there. 

  • We now disable the "Next" button if you are on the last thread in the queue.

  • You now have custom snooze durations in cmd+k.

  • You can use the snooze shortcut when the sidebar is closed.

  • Dragging a thread into 'paused for later' in kanban view.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug with dark mode colors when you are using the arrows so you can now actually see what you've selected.

  • Fixed a bug where volume breakdown didn't show data when selecting 120 days.

  • Fixed a bug where you select a custom date of just one day and it would show "Today" in the x-axis instead of the date selected.

  • Fixed a bug where if you selected one day in the custom field it would not show data and it would show the wrong date in the x-axis.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Kanban board

Image showing how the kanban board works in Plain

Today, we’re launching a kanban board view – giving your team better visibility into all your open customer requests. With the kanban board, you can view all threads from all your customer channels, at once. 

Once turned on, the kanban board will be enabled across your queue on all your queue and status pages, tier page, and label page. 

Add filters 
You can filter your kanban board by any property to get a detailed of the threads you need. Filter by assignee, tier, label, SLA, status, and more – by hitting “Filters” on the top right hand side of your queue view (keyboard shortcut: F). 

Drag and drop 
You can quickly drag and drop individual customer requests to change their status, tier, or label. 

Bulk actions 
To change the status, tier, or label of multiple threads at once, hit “shift+cmd+click” to individually select the threads you want to bulk action.You can then simply drag and drop them into the column you want to move them to. 

Update assignee 
You can easily update the assignee of a thread straight from the kanban view. Just hit the avatar of the current assignee to change it to another person. 

How to enable kanban view 
You can turn on the kanban view for your own personal workspace by hitting “Display” (keyboard shortcut: V) on the top right hand side of your queue view. Select “Board” and you’ll see the kanban view appear. Once you turn it on, this will be your personal default view – it’s not possible to enable kanban at a workspace level. 

Improvements

  • We've introduced a new workflow rule condition to allow you to trigger rules based on the support channel a customer request has been sent through

  • We’ve shipped webhook versioning and improvements to our TypeScript SDK webhook handling.

Bug fixes

  • We have implemented and deployed a fix to resolve an issue around our email bounce handling system. Previously, emails that bounced weren't correctly processed.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Kanban board

Image showing how the kanban board works in Plain

Today, we’re launching a kanban board view – giving your team better visibility into all your open customer requests. With the kanban board, you can view all threads from all your customer channels, at once. 

Once turned on, the kanban board will be enabled across your queue on all your queue and status pages, tier page, and label page. 

Add filters 
You can filter your kanban board by any property to get a detailed of the threads you need. Filter by assignee, tier, label, SLA, status, and more – by hitting “Filters” on the top right hand side of your queue view (keyboard shortcut: F). 

Drag and drop 
You can quickly drag and drop individual customer requests to change their status, tier, or label. 

Bulk actions 
To change the status, tier, or label of multiple threads at once, hit “shift+cmd+click” to individually select the threads you want to bulk action.You can then simply drag and drop them into the column you want to move them to. 

Update assignee 
You can easily update the assignee of a thread straight from the kanban view. Just hit the avatar of the current assignee to change it to another person. 

How to enable kanban view 
You can turn on the kanban view for your own personal workspace by hitting “Display” (keyboard shortcut: V) on the top right hand side of your queue view. Select “Board” and you’ll see the kanban view appear. Once you turn it on, this will be your personal default view – it’s not possible to enable kanban at a workspace level. 

Improvements

  • We've introduced a new workflow rule condition to allow you to trigger rules based on the support channel a customer request has been sent through

  • We’ve shipped webhook versioning and improvements to our TypeScript SDK webhook handling.

Bug fixes

  • We have implemented and deployed a fix to resolve an issue around our email bounce handling system. Previously, emails that bounced weren't correctly processed.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Kanban board

Image showing how the kanban board works in Plain

Today, we’re launching a kanban board view – giving your team better visibility into all your open customer requests. With the kanban board, you can view all threads from all your customer channels, at once. 

Once turned on, the kanban board will be enabled across your queue on all your queue and status pages, tier page, and label page. 

Add filters 
You can filter your kanban board by any property to get a detailed of the threads you need. Filter by assignee, tier, label, SLA, status, and more – by hitting “Filters” on the top right hand side of your queue view (keyboard shortcut: F). 

Drag and drop 
You can quickly drag and drop individual customer requests to change their status, tier, or label. 

Bulk actions 
To change the status, tier, or label of multiple threads at once, hit “shift+cmd+click” to individually select the threads you want to bulk action.You can then simply drag and drop them into the column you want to move them to. 

Update assignee 
You can easily update the assignee of a thread straight from the kanban view. Just hit the avatar of the current assignee to change it to another person. 

How to enable kanban view 
You can turn on the kanban view for your own personal workspace by hitting “Display” (keyboard shortcut: V) on the top right hand side of your queue view. Select “Board” and you’ll see the kanban view appear. Once you turn it on, this will be your personal default view – it’s not possible to enable kanban at a workspace level. 

Improvements

  • We've introduced a new workflow rule condition to allow you to trigger rules based on the support channel a customer request has been sent through

  • We’ve shipped webhook versioning and improvements to our TypeScript SDK webhook handling.

Bug fixes

  • We have implemented and deployed a fix to resolve an issue around our email bounce handling system. Previously, emails that bounced weren't correctly processed.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Slack digests

Changelog hero image showing Slack digest

Today we’re releasing daily Slack digests. You’ll get a summary of your Plain account activity delivered to Slack every weekday. Digests are currently only available via our Slack integration. 

Digests will send the following information to your notification channel every weekday at a time of your choice: 

  • Number of threads waiting for first response and the 3 most recent threads title and link

  • Number of threads waiting for next response and the 3 most recent threads title and link

  • Counts for threads being investigated, waiting to close the loop, and paused

To turn on daily Slack digests for your team: Go to Workspace settings → Notifications → Create (or edit) a Slack integration → Choose Digests. Check our docs for more info or reach out to us if you've got any questions.

What's new

  • New display options in your queue: you can now toggle the properties that you want to see in your queue on and off. Just hit Display in the top right corner of your queue (keyboard shortcut: V), and toggle your selections on and off. These options will also be reflected in your in-thread queue. 

  • Your most frequently used emojis are now saved in Plain

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Slack digests

Changelog hero image showing Slack digest

Today we’re releasing daily Slack digests. You’ll get a summary of your Plain account activity delivered to Slack every weekday. Digests are currently only available via our Slack integration. 

Digests will send the following information to your notification channel every weekday at a time of your choice: 

  • Number of threads waiting for first response and the 3 most recent threads title and link

  • Number of threads waiting for next response and the 3 most recent threads title and link

  • Counts for threads being investigated, waiting to close the loop, and paused

To turn on daily Slack digests for your team: Go to Workspace settings → Notifications → Create (or edit) a Slack integration → Choose Digests. Check our docs for more info or reach out to us if you've got any questions.

What's new

  • New display options in your queue: you can now toggle the properties that you want to see in your queue on and off. Just hit Display in the top right corner of your queue (keyboard shortcut: V), and toggle your selections on and off. These options will also be reflected in your in-thread queue. 

  • Your most frequently used emojis are now saved in Plain

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Slack digests

Changelog hero image showing Slack digest

Today we’re releasing daily Slack digests. You’ll get a summary of your Plain account activity delivered to Slack every weekday. Digests are currently only available via our Slack integration. 

Digests will send the following information to your notification channel every weekday at a time of your choice: 

  • Number of threads waiting for first response and the 3 most recent threads title and link

  • Number of threads waiting for next response and the 3 most recent threads title and link

  • Counts for threads being investigated, waiting to close the loop, and paused

To turn on daily Slack digests for your team: Go to Workspace settings → Notifications → Create (or edit) a Slack integration → Choose Digests. Check our docs for more info or reach out to us if you've got any questions.

What's new

  • New display options in your queue: you can now toggle the properties that you want to see in your queue on and off. Just hit Display in the top right corner of your queue (keyboard shortcut: V), and toggle your selections on and off. These options will also be reflected in your in-thread queue. 

  • Your most frequently used emojis are now saved in Plain

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Upcoming downtime due to maintenance

We've scheduled an essential maintenance window on Plain, during which we will upgrade our main database cluster.

When: Wednesday, 2nd October at 6AM to 8AM UTC.

  • New York (EDT): 2AM

  • Berlin (CET): 8AM

  • California (PDT): 11PM on the 1st of October

  • Sydney (AET): 4PM

What to expect during this time:

  • There will be no access to app.plain.com

  • The API will be unavailable

  • Webhooks will not be sent

  • Notifications will not be sent

Rest assured:

  • There will be no data loss: all inbound emails, Slack messages, MS Teams messages, Linear issue updates and data from importers will be safely queued and processed after the downtime. No information or customer messages will be lost.

  • SLA tracking won't stop during downtime. Breached SLAs during this maintenance window will trigger an alert right after the maintenance is over.

  • Flexible timing: we've set a 2-hour window as a precaution, but we are working hard to minimize the actual downtime

What you need to do:
We strongly recommend planning around this maintenance window with your team to reduce the impact on your internal processes. If you use our API, make sure your code gracefully handles HTTP 503 errors during this time.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Upcoming downtime due to maintenance

We've scheduled an essential maintenance window on Plain, during which we will upgrade our main database cluster.

When: Wednesday, 2nd October at 6AM to 8AM UTC.

  • New York (EDT): 2AM

  • Berlin (CET): 8AM

  • California (PDT): 11PM on the 1st of October

  • Sydney (AET): 4PM

What to expect during this time:

  • There will be no access to app.plain.com

  • The API will be unavailable

  • Webhooks will not be sent

  • Notifications will not be sent

Rest assured:

  • There will be no data loss: all inbound emails, Slack messages, MS Teams messages, Linear issue updates and data from importers will be safely queued and processed after the downtime. No information or customer messages will be lost.

  • SLA tracking won't stop during downtime. Breached SLAs during this maintenance window will trigger an alert right after the maintenance is over.

  • Flexible timing: we've set a 2-hour window as a precaution, but we are working hard to minimize the actual downtime

What you need to do:
We strongly recommend planning around this maintenance window with your team to reduce the impact on your internal processes. If you use our API, make sure your code gracefully handles HTTP 503 errors during this time.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Upcoming downtime due to maintenance

We've scheduled an essential maintenance window on Plain, during which we will upgrade our main database cluster.

When: Wednesday, 2nd October at 6AM to 8AM UTC.

  • New York (EDT): 2AM

  • Berlin (CET): 8AM

  • California (PDT): 11PM on the 1st of October

  • Sydney (AET): 4PM

What to expect during this time:

  • There will be no access to app.plain.com

  • The API will be unavailable

  • Webhooks will not be sent

  • Notifications will not be sent

Rest assured:

  • There will be no data loss: all inbound emails, Slack messages, MS Teams messages, Linear issue updates and data from importers will be safely queued and processed after the downtime. No information or customer messages will be lost.

  • SLA tracking won't stop during downtime. Breached SLAs during this maintenance window will trigger an alert right after the maintenance is over.

  • Flexible timing: we've set a 2-hour window as a precaution, but we are working hard to minimize the actual downtime

What you need to do:
We strongly recommend planning around this maintenance window with your team to reduce the impact on your internal processes. If you use our API, make sure your code gracefully handles HTTP 503 errors during this time.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Redesigned support queue

Changelog hero image showing new queue design

We’ve redesigned your queue view to make it more space efficient and easier to scan – ensuring your queue covers the key information you need, where you need it. This redesign makes it easier to pull out the information that matters from your queue. 

What’s changed:

  • Same information, with cleaner design
    All the information in your queues is still there, but the design has been refreshed across all status views, as well as on your company and customer pages. 

  • Clearer Priorities
    SLAs have been moved for better visibility, new avatars are in place, and we’ve generally tidied things up to make your queue more efficient. It’s easier to spot what needs action at a glance, speeding up your workflow.

  • Better on Smaller Screens
    Sometimes you’re not working through your queue on a big screen. We’ve introduced a new table format so your queue is visible on all screen sizes. Scroll through your queue and still see key info, even on a smaller screen.

  • Updated In-Thread Queue View
    Your in-thread queue view now has clearer SLA info, and thread titles and descriptions have been tidied up, making it easier for you to prioritize the threads you need to action next. 

The queue redesign has been turned on for all workspaces in Plain, no action is needed on your side to enable them. Please reach out via your shared Slack channel, or email us (help@plain.com). 

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll ship some further updates to your queue view – including: 

  • The ability to hide columns in the new queue view, so you can focus on the information that your team needs

  • Kanban queue view

What's new

  • You can now add multiple business hour slots and timezones, making it easier to set expectations with customers in different timezones.

  • You can now group your support queue by items like priority, status, company, label, tier, and more. 

Improvements

  • Insights now exclude “Ignored” threads by default 

  • Updated timeline UI, making it clearer what actions happened when, and by whom 

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Redesigned support queue

Changelog hero image showing new queue design

We’ve redesigned your queue view to make it more space efficient and easier to scan – ensuring your queue covers the key information you need, where you need it. This redesign makes it easier to pull out the information that matters from your queue. 

What’s changed:

  • Same information, with cleaner design
    All the information in your queues is still there, but the design has been refreshed across all status views, as well as on your company and customer pages. 

  • Clearer Priorities
    SLAs have been moved for better visibility, new avatars are in place, and we’ve generally tidied things up to make your queue more efficient. It’s easier to spot what needs action at a glance, speeding up your workflow.

  • Better on Smaller Screens
    Sometimes you’re not working through your queue on a big screen. We’ve introduced a new table format so your queue is visible on all screen sizes. Scroll through your queue and still see key info, even on a smaller screen.

  • Updated In-Thread Queue View
    Your in-thread queue view now has clearer SLA info, and thread titles and descriptions have been tidied up, making it easier for you to prioritize the threads you need to action next. 

The queue redesign has been turned on for all workspaces in Plain, no action is needed on your side to enable them. Please reach out via your shared Slack channel, or email us (help@plain.com). 

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll ship some further updates to your queue view – including: 

  • The ability to hide columns in the new queue view, so you can focus on the information that your team needs

  • Kanban queue view

What's new

  • You can now add multiple business hour slots and timezones, making it easier to set expectations with customers in different timezones.

  • You can now group your support queue by items like priority, status, company, label, tier, and more. 

Improvements

  • Insights now exclude “Ignored” threads by default 

  • Updated timeline UI, making it clearer what actions happened when, and by whom 

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Redesigned support queue

Changelog hero image showing new queue design

We’ve redesigned your queue view to make it more space efficient and easier to scan – ensuring your queue covers the key information you need, where you need it. This redesign makes it easier to pull out the information that matters from your queue. 

What’s changed:

  • Same information, with cleaner design
    All the information in your queues is still there, but the design has been refreshed across all status views, as well as on your company and customer pages. 

  • Clearer Priorities
    SLAs have been moved for better visibility, new avatars are in place, and we’ve generally tidied things up to make your queue more efficient. It’s easier to spot what needs action at a glance, speeding up your workflow.

  • Better on Smaller Screens
    Sometimes you’re not working through your queue on a big screen. We’ve introduced a new table format so your queue is visible on all screen sizes. Scroll through your queue and still see key info, even on a smaller screen.

  • Updated In-Thread Queue View
    Your in-thread queue view now has clearer SLA info, and thread titles and descriptions have been tidied up, making it easier for you to prioritize the threads you need to action next. 

The queue redesign has been turned on for all workspaces in Plain, no action is needed on your side to enable them. Please reach out via your shared Slack channel, or email us (help@plain.com). 

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll ship some further updates to your queue view – including: 

  • The ability to hide columns in the new queue view, so you can focus on the information that your team needs

  • Kanban queue view

What's new

  • You can now add multiple business hour slots and timezones, making it easier to set expectations with customers in different timezones.

  • You can now group your support queue by items like priority, status, company, label, tier, and more. 

Improvements

  • Insights now exclude “Ignored” threads by default 

  • Updated timeline UI, making it clearer what actions happened when, and by whom 

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Automate repetitive tasks with Workflow Rules

Changelog hero image

Today, we’re rolling out Workflow Rules to help your support team save time and avoid manual work in Plain. With customizable conditions and actions, you can automate repetitive tasks and streamline your team’s processes.

Some common use-cases include:

  • Assign all support requests from specific companies or tiers to specific members of your team (e.g. all Enterprise threads get assigned to Simon).

  • Automatically assign certain priorities to threads if they contain key phrases or words (e.g. all threads containing the word “urgent” get assigned “urgent” priority).

  • Assign threads based on the support email your customer has reached out to (e.g. assign all security@ emails to Matt)

We’ve built core conditions you can choose from to trigger automations: 

  • A label is applied to a thread.

  • Customer is from a specific company.

  • Customer reached out via a specific Slack channel.

  • Thread is tagged with a specific tier (like Enterprise).

  • Thread was sent to a specific support email (e.g. sales@yourcompany.com).

  • Thread contains certain keywords (e.g. vulnerability, bug).

When the chosen condition matches a thread, we’ll automate the following actions: 

  • Assign a thread to the right person.

  • Set thread priority.

  • Apply a label of your choice.

Workflow Rules are available now to all existing customers on our Grow tier and above. To manage your workflow rules go to Settings → Workflow Rules. Check out our docs for more information. 

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Automate repetitive tasks with Workflow Rules

Changelog hero image

Today, we’re rolling out Workflow Rules to help your support team save time and avoid manual work in Plain. With customizable conditions and actions, you can automate repetitive tasks and streamline your team’s processes.

Some common use-cases include:

  • Assign all support requests from specific companies or tiers to specific members of your team (e.g. all Enterprise threads get assigned to Simon).

  • Automatically assign certain priorities to threads if they contain key phrases or words (e.g. all threads containing the word “urgent” get assigned “urgent” priority).

  • Assign threads based on the support email your customer has reached out to (e.g. assign all security@ emails to Matt)

We’ve built core conditions you can choose from to trigger automations: 

  • A label is applied to a thread.

  • Customer is from a specific company.

  • Customer reached out via a specific Slack channel.

  • Thread is tagged with a specific tier (like Enterprise).

  • Thread was sent to a specific support email (e.g. sales@yourcompany.com).

  • Thread contains certain keywords (e.g. vulnerability, bug).

When the chosen condition matches a thread, we’ll automate the following actions: 

  • Assign a thread to the right person.

  • Set thread priority.

  • Apply a label of your choice.

Workflow Rules are available now to all existing customers on our Grow tier and above. To manage your workflow rules go to Settings → Workflow Rules. Check out our docs for more information. 

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Automate repetitive tasks with Workflow Rules

Changelog hero image

Today, we’re rolling out Workflow Rules to help your support team save time and avoid manual work in Plain. With customizable conditions and actions, you can automate repetitive tasks and streamline your team’s processes.

Some common use-cases include:

  • Assign all support requests from specific companies or tiers to specific members of your team (e.g. all Enterprise threads get assigned to Simon).

  • Automatically assign certain priorities to threads if they contain key phrases or words (e.g. all threads containing the word “urgent” get assigned “urgent” priority).

  • Assign threads based on the support email your customer has reached out to (e.g. assign all security@ emails to Matt)

We’ve built core conditions you can choose from to trigger automations: 

  • A label is applied to a thread.

  • Customer is from a specific company.

  • Customer reached out via a specific Slack channel.

  • Thread is tagged with a specific tier (like Enterprise).

  • Thread was sent to a specific support email (e.g. sales@yourcompany.com).

  • Thread contains certain keywords (e.g. vulnerability, bug).

When the chosen condition matches a thread, we’ll automate the following actions: 

  • Assign a thread to the right person.

  • Set thread priority.

  • Apply a label of your choice.

Workflow Rules are available now to all existing customers on our Grow tier and above. To manage your workflow rules go to Settings → Workflow Rules. Check out our docs for more information. 

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Auto-mark customer requests as “Done”

Image showing thread marked as Done in Plain

Today we’re shipping another status update to help tidy up your support queue. Now, customer requests are automatically marked as Done after a set number of days have passed (you choose how many). 

Sometimes customers find their own answers or simply don’t respond. This update helps keep your queue clear of requests that no longer need your team’s attention.

To introduce this new automation to your support workflow, just head to the workflow section of your workspace settings, and choose how many days you’d like to wait before your threads are automatically marked as done. 

This means that if you set threads to automatically move to waiting for customer when you reply directly in Slack, those threads will now also auto-mark as Done – meaning your queue starts to manage itself over time. 

We’ve also worked on some stellar quality of life updates to the Plain app, check them out below 👇

What's new

  • Introduced HubSpot sync. Bring customer and company data from HubSpot into Plain in just a few clicks – giving you the information you need, where you need it.

  • Added a custom date range picker to your Insights, allowing more control over your reporting. This is available on our Grow and Scale pricing tiers. 

  • If you pause a thread for later, it will now go back to its previous status when the pause duration runs out

  • When you search for a Company, you’ll now see the count and status of their open threads from the search view

  • You can now set an “Ignored” status to threads that don’t actually need support. Once a thread is ignored, any additional messages in the thread will have no effect on it's status. “Ignored” threads will be removed from Insights – this work should be completed in the following days.

Improvements

  • We now allow you to create custom companies where we don't find the domain in our companies provider. This means that a customer gets in touch from a domain we can't automatically resolve company details for, we'll still create a company now instead of leaving it as not set.

  • Adding/removing company from customer or tier will now update all of their threads – regardless of their status 

  • You can set/unset a Tier directly from a thread – either in the thread details card in the sidebar, or by hitting CMD+K

  • You can now delete a customer directly from the right hand side menu next to the customer's name. If you do not see this option it means you do not have the relevant permissions

  • If you add two SLAs with overlapping priorities for FRT (first response time) or NRT (next response time), we will now show an error rather than allowing it to happen

  • You can now invite multiple users to Plain at once

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jesús Hernández

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Auto-mark customer requests as “Done”

Image showing thread marked as Done in Plain

Today we’re shipping another status update to help tidy up your support queue. Now, customer requests are automatically marked as Done after a set number of days have passed (you choose how many). 

Sometimes customers find their own answers or simply don’t respond. This update helps keep your queue clear of requests that no longer need your team’s attention.

To introduce this new automation to your support workflow, just head to the workflow section of your workspace settings, and choose how many days you’d like to wait before your threads are automatically marked as done. 

This means that if you set threads to automatically move to waiting for customer when you reply directly in Slack, those threads will now also auto-mark as Done – meaning your queue starts to manage itself over time. 

We’ve also worked on some stellar quality of life updates to the Plain app, check them out below 👇

What's new

  • Introduced HubSpot sync. Bring customer and company data from HubSpot into Plain in just a few clicks – giving you the information you need, where you need it.

  • Added a custom date range picker to your Insights, allowing more control over your reporting. This is available on our Grow and Scale pricing tiers. 

  • If you pause a thread for later, it will now go back to its previous status when the pause duration runs out

  • When you search for a Company, you’ll now see the count and status of their open threads from the search view

  • You can now set an “Ignored” status to threads that don’t actually need support. Once a thread is ignored, any additional messages in the thread will have no effect on it's status. “Ignored” threads will be removed from Insights – this work should be completed in the following days.

Improvements

  • We now allow you to create custom companies where we don't find the domain in our companies provider. This means that a customer gets in touch from a domain we can't automatically resolve company details for, we'll still create a company now instead of leaving it as not set.

  • Adding/removing company from customer or tier will now update all of their threads – regardless of their status 

  • You can set/unset a Tier directly from a thread – either in the thread details card in the sidebar, or by hitting CMD+K

  • You can now delete a customer directly from the right hand side menu next to the customer's name. If you do not see this option it means you do not have the relevant permissions

  • If you add two SLAs with overlapping priorities for FRT (first response time) or NRT (next response time), we will now show an error rather than allowing it to happen

  • You can now invite multiple users to Plain at once

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jesús Hernández

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Auto-mark customer requests as “Done”

Image showing thread marked as Done in Plain

Today we’re shipping another status update to help tidy up your support queue. Now, customer requests are automatically marked as Done after a set number of days have passed (you choose how many). 

Sometimes customers find their own answers or simply don’t respond. This update helps keep your queue clear of requests that no longer need your team’s attention.

To introduce this new automation to your support workflow, just head to the workflow section of your workspace settings, and choose how many days you’d like to wait before your threads are automatically marked as done. 

This means that if you set threads to automatically move to waiting for customer when you reply directly in Slack, those threads will now also auto-mark as Done – meaning your queue starts to manage itself over time. 

We’ve also worked on some stellar quality of life updates to the Plain app, check them out below 👇

What's new

  • Introduced HubSpot sync. Bring customer and company data from HubSpot into Plain in just a few clicks – giving you the information you need, where you need it.

  • Added a custom date range picker to your Insights, allowing more control over your reporting. This is available on our Grow and Scale pricing tiers. 

  • If you pause a thread for later, it will now go back to its previous status when the pause duration runs out

  • When you search for a Company, you’ll now see the count and status of their open threads from the search view

  • You can now set an “Ignored” status to threads that don’t actually need support. Once a thread is ignored, any additional messages in the thread will have no effect on it's status. “Ignored” threads will be removed from Insights – this work should be completed in the following days.

Improvements

  • We now allow you to create custom companies where we don't find the domain in our companies provider. This means that a customer gets in touch from a domain we can't automatically resolve company details for, we'll still create a company now instead of leaving it as not set.

  • Adding/removing company from customer or tier will now update all of their threads – regardless of their status 

  • You can set/unset a Tier directly from a thread – either in the thread details card in the sidebar, or by hitting CMD+K

  • You can now delete a customer directly from the right hand side menu next to the customer's name. If you do not see this option it means you do not have the relevant permissions

  • If you add two SLAs with overlapping priorities for FRT (first response time) or NRT (next response time), we will now show an error rather than allowing it to happen

  • You can now invite multiple users to Plain at once

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jesús Hernández

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Microsoft Teams integration

The hardest part of support is showing up where your customers are.

Today we’re releasing our Microsoft Teams integration – making it easier for your team to support your customers where they already are.

In just a few minutes, you can connect Microsoft Teams to Plain, consolidating your support stack and simplifying your workflow. Support all your customers from one fast, extensible platform.

With our Teams integration, you’ll give your VIP customers the attention they deserve. Utilize Tiers to ensure you’re prioritizing the right customer requests, and organize your queue however you need (e.g. by pricing structure). Stay ahead of every request with customizable SLAs and real-time breach alerts.

Check out our docs for more details on how to set up Microsoft Teams with Plain. Book a demo today if you’d like to learn more – we’d love to show you around. 

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Microsoft Teams integration

The hardest part of support is showing up where your customers are.

Today we’re releasing our Microsoft Teams integration – making it easier for your team to support your customers where they already are.

In just a few minutes, you can connect Microsoft Teams to Plain, consolidating your support stack and simplifying your workflow. Support all your customers from one fast, extensible platform.

With our Teams integration, you’ll give your VIP customers the attention they deserve. Utilize Tiers to ensure you’re prioritizing the right customer requests, and organize your queue however you need (e.g. by pricing structure). Stay ahead of every request with customizable SLAs and real-time breach alerts.

Check out our docs for more details on how to set up Microsoft Teams with Plain. Book a demo today if you’d like to learn more – we’d love to show you around. 

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Microsoft Teams integration

The hardest part of support is showing up where your customers are.

Today we’re releasing our Microsoft Teams integration – making it easier for your team to support your customers where they already are.

In just a few minutes, you can connect Microsoft Teams to Plain, consolidating your support stack and simplifying your workflow. Support all your customers from one fast, extensible platform.

With our Teams integration, you’ll give your VIP customers the attention they deserve. Utilize Tiers to ensure you’re prioritizing the right customer requests, and organize your queue however you need (e.g. by pricing structure). Stay ahead of every request with customizable SLAs and real-time breach alerts.

Check out our docs for more details on how to set up Microsoft Teams with Plain. Book a demo today if you’d like to learn more – we’d love to show you around. 

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

New support queue statuses

Today we’re excited to release new statuses in Plain. We’ve heard and implemented these changes based on feedback we’ve received over the past couple of months – and you’ll now have a better overview of the progress you’re making on your support threads. The new statuses better reflect how support teams work.

Previously, there were 3 statuses in Plain: Todo, Snoozed and Done. These covered the basics, but didn’t help you understand the status of in progress threads without some digging.

Today we’re introducing several new statuses to bring more structure to your support queue. 

Todo is now broken down into more relevant statuses, so you know what a thread is waiting on: 

  • Needs first response – a customer got in touch over a new issue and they are waiting for you to reply 

  • Needs next response – this status indicates that this isn’t a new thread, and there’s already been some back-and-forth with your customer 

  • Investigating – threads that your team are actively finding the root cause for

Snoozed is now broken up into 2 sections, making the purpose behind the snooze clearer for your team:

  • Waiting for customer – you are waiting for the customer to reply

  • Paused for later – the thread is snoozed because your team are doing the work required to actually close the thread and solve the issue for your customer

With these new statuses come some improved workflow upgrades for you and your team:

  • Improved status picker UI
    Previously to change the status of a thread, you had to choose it from the sidebar. Statuses can now be changed from the quick action bar below the composer (keyboard shortcut: S)

  • Improved status syncing between Slack and Plain:
    When you respond to a support request in Slack, the thread will automatically move to “waiting for customer” – meaning you don’t need to make updates in Plain and Slack. Your customer support queue will accurately represent the status of each thread, regardless of whether you’ve replied in Plain or Slack.

  • Bulk actions on statuses are here
    You can now change the status of your customer threads in bulk, rather than updating them one-by-one. 

If you are currently consuming status transition webhook events, there are no required changes you need to make right now. However, in the coming weeks, we will get in touch with you to offer a migration path to get webhook events including the new statuses.

Today’s release is just the start of some really exciting UI and workflow changes that we’ll be making over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more updates.  🎉

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Jesús Hernández

Engineering

David Leyland

Engineering

New support queue statuses

Today we’re excited to release new statuses in Plain. We’ve heard and implemented these changes based on feedback we’ve received over the past couple of months – and you’ll now have a better overview of the progress you’re making on your support threads. The new statuses better reflect how support teams work.

Previously, there were 3 statuses in Plain: Todo, Snoozed and Done. These covered the basics, but didn’t help you understand the status of in progress threads without some digging.

Today we’re introducing several new statuses to bring more structure to your support queue. 

Todo is now broken down into more relevant statuses, so you know what a thread is waiting on: 

  • Needs first response – a customer got in touch over a new issue and they are waiting for you to reply 

  • Needs next response – this status indicates that this isn’t a new thread, and there’s already been some back-and-forth with your customer 

  • Investigating – threads that your team are actively finding the root cause for

Snoozed is now broken up into 2 sections, making the purpose behind the snooze clearer for your team:

  • Waiting for customer – you are waiting for the customer to reply

  • Paused for later – the thread is snoozed because your team are doing the work required to actually close the thread and solve the issue for your customer

With these new statuses come some improved workflow upgrades for you and your team:

  • Improved status picker UI
    Previously to change the status of a thread, you had to choose it from the sidebar. Statuses can now be changed from the quick action bar below the composer (keyboard shortcut: S)

  • Improved status syncing between Slack and Plain:
    When you respond to a support request in Slack, the thread will automatically move to “waiting for customer” – meaning you don’t need to make updates in Plain and Slack. Your customer support queue will accurately represent the status of each thread, regardless of whether you’ve replied in Plain or Slack.

  • Bulk actions on statuses are here
    You can now change the status of your customer threads in bulk, rather than updating them one-by-one. 

If you are currently consuming status transition webhook events, there are no required changes you need to make right now. However, in the coming weeks, we will get in touch with you to offer a migration path to get webhook events including the new statuses.

Today’s release is just the start of some really exciting UI and workflow changes that we’ll be making over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more updates.  🎉

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Jesús Hernández

Engineering

David Leyland

Engineering

New support queue statuses

Today we’re excited to release new statuses in Plain. We’ve heard and implemented these changes based on feedback we’ve received over the past couple of months – and you’ll now have a better overview of the progress you’re making on your support threads. The new statuses better reflect how support teams work.

Previously, there were 3 statuses in Plain: Todo, Snoozed and Done. These covered the basics, but didn’t help you understand the status of in progress threads without some digging.

Today we’re introducing several new statuses to bring more structure to your support queue. 

Todo is now broken down into more relevant statuses, so you know what a thread is waiting on: 

  • Needs first response – a customer got in touch over a new issue and they are waiting for you to reply 

  • Needs next response – this status indicates that this isn’t a new thread, and there’s already been some back-and-forth with your customer 

  • Investigating – threads that your team are actively finding the root cause for

Snoozed is now broken up into 2 sections, making the purpose behind the snooze clearer for your team:

  • Waiting for customer – you are waiting for the customer to reply

  • Paused for later – the thread is snoozed because your team are doing the work required to actually close the thread and solve the issue for your customer

With these new statuses come some improved workflow upgrades for you and your team:

  • Improved status picker UI
    Previously to change the status of a thread, you had to choose it from the sidebar. Statuses can now be changed from the quick action bar below the composer (keyboard shortcut: S)

  • Improved status syncing between Slack and Plain:
    When you respond to a support request in Slack, the thread will automatically move to “waiting for customer” – meaning you don’t need to make updates in Plain and Slack. Your customer support queue will accurately represent the status of each thread, regardless of whether you’ve replied in Plain or Slack.

  • Bulk actions on statuses are here
    You can now change the status of your customer threads in bulk, rather than updating them one-by-one. 

If you are currently consuming status transition webhook events, there are no required changes you need to make right now. However, in the coming weeks, we will get in touch with you to offer a migration path to get webhook events including the new statuses.

Today’s release is just the start of some really exciting UI and workflow changes that we’ll be making over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more updates.  🎉

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Jesús Hernández

Engineering

David Leyland

Engineering

Help Scout importer

We’ve shipped a few importers this year, including Zendesk, Salesforce, and Freshdesk. This week, we’re excited to be adding another importer to our repertoire, with a Help Scout importer. Sync or migrate your customer data to Plain in just a few clicks to speed up your support workflow and consolidate your support channels.

Once you connect Help Scout to Plain for the first time, we’ll import all your existing data. After the initial migration has taken place, any new end user, conversation, thread, or tag created in HelpScout will automatically be synced to Plain.

Check out our docs to learn more about how you can migrate your Help Scout data to Plain in just a few hours.

What's new

  • HMAC request signing for outgoing requests from Plain to your target URLs. Check out the docs.

  • New Auto-response condition: support email.

Bug fixes

  • Outbound messages on a done thread no longer move a thread back to todo

Designed, built and written by

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Help Scout importer

We’ve shipped a few importers this year, including Zendesk, Salesforce, and Freshdesk. This week, we’re excited to be adding another importer to our repertoire, with a Help Scout importer. Sync or migrate your customer data to Plain in just a few clicks to speed up your support workflow and consolidate your support channels.

Once you connect Help Scout to Plain for the first time, we’ll import all your existing data. After the initial migration has taken place, any new end user, conversation, thread, or tag created in HelpScout will automatically be synced to Plain.

Check out our docs to learn more about how you can migrate your Help Scout data to Plain in just a few hours.

What's new

  • HMAC request signing for outgoing requests from Plain to your target URLs. Check out the docs.

  • New Auto-response condition: support email.

Bug fixes

  • Outbound messages on a done thread no longer move a thread back to todo

Designed, built and written by

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Help Scout importer

We’ve shipped a few importers this year, including Zendesk, Salesforce, and Freshdesk. This week, we’re excited to be adding another importer to our repertoire, with a Help Scout importer. Sync or migrate your customer data to Plain in just a few clicks to speed up your support workflow and consolidate your support channels.

Once you connect Help Scout to Plain for the first time, we’ll import all your existing data. After the initial migration has taken place, any new end user, conversation, thread, or tag created in HelpScout will automatically be synced to Plain.

Check out our docs to learn more about how you can migrate your Help Scout data to Plain in just a few hours.

What's new

  • HMAC request signing for outgoing requests from Plain to your target URLs. Check out the docs.

  • New Auto-response condition: support email.

Bug fixes

  • Outbound messages on a done thread no longer move a thread back to todo

Designed, built and written by

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Thread fields reporting

Earlier this year we announced thread fields – allowing you to customize the data stored on a thread object to your liking.

Today, we’ve added the ability to filter reporting on boolean and enum thread fields in your team’s insights tab. You now have access to a breakdown of your thread fields across all possible values, and can dig into a specific field/value combination to check out how your support team is handling those requests.

With today’s launch, you can learn about your first response times, next response times, resolution times, and more – per thread field.

If you don’t currently use thread fields in Plain, you can utilize thread fields AI to start creating these key insights for your team, without your team having to fill them out per thread.

Improvements

  • We’ve updated our ingestion modes to allow your customers to decide which threads should be ingested to Plain, by reacting with emojis to their own messages.

Bug fixes

  • When attachments or images are deleted in Slack, we now also delete them permanently from Plain.

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Thread fields reporting

Earlier this year we announced thread fields – allowing you to customize the data stored on a thread object to your liking.

Today, we’ve added the ability to filter reporting on boolean and enum thread fields in your team’s insights tab. You now have access to a breakdown of your thread fields across all possible values, and can dig into a specific field/value combination to check out how your support team is handling those requests.

With today’s launch, you can learn about your first response times, next response times, resolution times, and more – per thread field.

If you don’t currently use thread fields in Plain, you can utilize thread fields AI to start creating these key insights for your team, without your team having to fill them out per thread.

Improvements

  • We’ve updated our ingestion modes to allow your customers to decide which threads should be ingested to Plain, by reacting with emojis to their own messages.

Bug fixes

  • When attachments or images are deleted in Slack, we now also delete them permanently from Plain.

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Thread fields reporting

Earlier this year we announced thread fields – allowing you to customize the data stored on a thread object to your liking.

Today, we’ve added the ability to filter reporting on boolean and enum thread fields in your team’s insights tab. You now have access to a breakdown of your thread fields across all possible values, and can dig into a specific field/value combination to check out how your support team is handling those requests.

With today’s launch, you can learn about your first response times, next response times, resolution times, and more – per thread field.

If you don’t currently use thread fields in Plain, you can utilize thread fields AI to start creating these key insights for your team, without your team having to fill them out per thread.

Improvements

  • We’ve updated our ingestion modes to allow your customers to decide which threads should be ingested to Plain, by reacting with emojis to their own messages.

Bug fixes

  • When attachments or images are deleted in Slack, we now also delete them permanently from Plain.

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Discourse integration

In addition to Slack, email, in-app forms, and headless portal, today we're announcing a new channel to Plain: Discourse. Consolidate your support stack even more and get consistent with how you do cross-channel support.

Check out our docs to learn how to connect your company's Discourse community.

You'll start receiving Discourse posts in Plain immediately, and use features like our Linear integration and discussions to collaborate better on these requests with your team.

Customize the priority, labels and assignee of support requests from Discourse based on their category, author and content, and get a birds-eye view of all your support requests in one consolidated platform.

Designed, built and written by

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Discourse integration

In addition to Slack, email, in-app forms, and headless portal, today we're announcing a new channel to Plain: Discourse. Consolidate your support stack even more and get consistent with how you do cross-channel support.

Check out our docs to learn how to connect your company's Discourse community.

You'll start receiving Discourse posts in Plain immediately, and use features like our Linear integration and discussions to collaborate better on these requests with your team.

Customize the priority, labels and assignee of support requests from Discourse based on their category, author and content, and get a birds-eye view of all your support requests in one consolidated platform.

Designed, built and written by

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Discourse integration

In addition to Slack, email, in-app forms, and headless portal, today we're announcing a new channel to Plain: Discourse. Consolidate your support stack even more and get consistent with how you do cross-channel support.

Check out our docs to learn how to connect your company's Discourse community.

You'll start receiving Discourse posts in Plain immediately, and use features like our Linear integration and discussions to collaborate better on these requests with your team.

Customize the priority, labels and assignee of support requests from Discourse based on their category, author and content, and get a birds-eye view of all your support requests in one consolidated platform.

Designed, built and written by

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

New workspace roles

Today, in conjunction with our work to introduce automated billing at Plain, we’ve introduced new roles and permissions for our customers.

At Plain, we believe that everyone at a company that values support, should have access to support. If you’re an engineer, you need it to debug. If you’re a PM, you need it to get feedback. Support is, and should be utilized as a window into your users.

With our new roles, this is super easy. It’s also extremely transparent. When you need to add or remove a member from your team – you’ll see upfront exactly how much it’ll cost.

What are the new roles?

We’ve adjusted the roles to better align with the way that our customers are using Plain.

  • 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.

Note: Owner, Admin, and Support seats are paid seats in Plain, while viewer seats are free. View our full pricing breakdown here.

There should be no impact for existing customers. New and existing customers can now manage billing and roles directly from your workspace settings.

Designed, built and written by

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

New workspace roles

Today, in conjunction with our work to introduce automated billing at Plain, we’ve introduced new roles and permissions for our customers.

At Plain, we believe that everyone at a company that values support, should have access to support. If you’re an engineer, you need it to debug. If you’re a PM, you need it to get feedback. Support is, and should be utilized as a window into your users.

With our new roles, this is super easy. It’s also extremely transparent. When you need to add or remove a member from your team – you’ll see upfront exactly how much it’ll cost.

What are the new roles?

We’ve adjusted the roles to better align with the way that our customers are using Plain.

  • 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.

Note: Owner, Admin, and Support seats are paid seats in Plain, while viewer seats are free. View our full pricing breakdown here.

There should be no impact for existing customers. New and existing customers can now manage billing and roles directly from your workspace settings.

Designed, built and written by

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

New workspace roles

Today, in conjunction with our work to introduce automated billing at Plain, we’ve introduced new roles and permissions for our customers.

At Plain, we believe that everyone at a company that values support, should have access to support. If you’re an engineer, you need it to debug. If you’re a PM, you need it to get feedback. Support is, and should be utilized as a window into your users.

With our new roles, this is super easy. It’s also extremely transparent. When you need to add or remove a member from your team – you’ll see upfront exactly how much it’ll cost.

What are the new roles?

We’ve adjusted the roles to better align with the way that our customers are using Plain.

  • 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.

Note: Owner, Admin, and Support seats are paid seats in Plain, while viewer seats are free. View our full pricing breakdown here.

There should be no impact for existing customers. New and existing customers can now manage billing and roles directly from your workspace settings.

Designed, built and written by

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

Mohamed Elghobaty

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Headless support portal

Today, we’re super excited to announce headless support portals can now be built with Plain.

With a headless support portal, you can enable your customers to see their open threads, start new threads, and check on the progress of issues, all from a portal that’s embedded in your own app.

Improvements

  • Give your customers access to their in-progress thread information, enable them to respond to threads, create threads, and allow anyone on their team to view key updates on issues they’ve submitted.

  • Fully embed your support portal in your own app, and maintain complete control over the interface. Give your customers the premium, branded experience they expect of you.

  • To help you build your own custom headless support portal, we’ve provided a set of powerful APIs as well as an example repository which allows you to easily create a fully custom support portal.

  • Check out the docs for detailed instructions, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you’ve got questions about building your team a headless support portal.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Headless support portal

Today, we’re super excited to announce headless support portals can now be built with Plain.

With a headless support portal, you can enable your customers to see their open threads, start new threads, and check on the progress of issues, all from a portal that’s embedded in your own app.

Improvements

  • Give your customers access to their in-progress thread information, enable them to respond to threads, create threads, and allow anyone on their team to view key updates on issues they’ve submitted.

  • Fully embed your support portal in your own app, and maintain complete control over the interface. Give your customers the premium, branded experience they expect of you.

  • To help you build your own custom headless support portal, we’ve provided a set of powerful APIs as well as an example repository which allows you to easily create a fully custom support portal.

  • Check out the docs for detailed instructions, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you’ve got questions about building your team a headless support portal.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Headless support portal

Today, we’re super excited to announce headless support portals can now be built with Plain.

With a headless support portal, you can enable your customers to see their open threads, start new threads, and check on the progress of issues, all from a portal that’s embedded in your own app.

Improvements

  • Give your customers access to their in-progress thread information, enable them to respond to threads, create threads, and allow anyone on their team to view key updates on issues they’ve submitted.

  • Fully embed your support portal in your own app, and maintain complete control over the interface. Give your customers the premium, branded experience they expect of you.

  • To help you build your own custom headless support portal, we’ve provided a set of powerful APIs as well as an example repository which allows you to easily create a fully custom support portal.

  • Check out the docs for detailed instructions, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you’ve got questions about building your team a headless support portal.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Slack emoji reactions

This week, we’ve shipped the ability to add and remove Slack emoji reactions, directly in Plain.

Image showing emoji reactions from Slack

Previously, if you wanted to add or remove an emoji reaction to a thread ingested to Plain through Slack, you had to open Slack to take action.

Now, you can react with Slack emojis directly in Plain. This allows you to get more consistent with how you support your Slack customers through Plain. No action is required to turn them on – Slack emoji reactions are automatically enabled for all Plain customers.

Improvements

  • You can now start a discussion by replying directly on a Plain notification in Slack

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug that was incorrectly showing discussion channels in Plain, that didn’t actually have the Plain app added to them

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Slack emoji reactions

This week, we’ve shipped the ability to add and remove Slack emoji reactions, directly in Plain.

Image showing emoji reactions from Slack

Previously, if you wanted to add or remove an emoji reaction to a thread ingested to Plain through Slack, you had to open Slack to take action.

Now, you can react with Slack emojis directly in Plain. This allows you to get more consistent with how you support your Slack customers through Plain. No action is required to turn them on – Slack emoji reactions are automatically enabled for all Plain customers.

Improvements

  • You can now start a discussion by replying directly on a Plain notification in Slack

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug that was incorrectly showing discussion channels in Plain, that didn’t actually have the Plain app added to them

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Slack emoji reactions

This week, we’ve shipped the ability to add and remove Slack emoji reactions, directly in Plain.

Image showing emoji reactions from Slack

Previously, if you wanted to add or remove an emoji reaction to a thread ingested to Plain through Slack, you had to open Slack to take action.

Now, you can react with Slack emojis directly in Plain. This allows you to get more consistent with how you support your Slack customers through Plain. No action is required to turn them on – Slack emoji reactions are automatically enabled for all Plain customers.

Improvements

  • You can now start a discussion by replying directly on a Plain notification in Slack

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug that was incorrectly showing discussion channels in Plain, that didn’t actually have the Plain app added to them

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Slack auto-responses

Today we’ve shipped auto-responses for Slack – allowing you to set better expectations on response times with customers you support through Slack.

We’ve also made tons of improvements to Slack discussions, check them out in our "New" section below.

Image showing autoresponder in Plain

Previously, auto-responses were only available for threads created through email or via API. To set up Slack auto-responses, head to your workspace settings → auto-responses and create a new one. You can decide if you want to send different auto-responses based on the channel the thread is sourced from, and add conditions to let you decide who receives what message. More detailed instructions are available in our docs.

What's new

  • Mentions, reactions, attachments are now available on Slack discussions

  • You can now resolve Slack discussions, ensuring you can close the loop on discussions relating to threads

  • You can now start a discussion in notification channels

  • You can now disable/enable Slack channels in your Slack settings

  • You can now customise Slack notification settings based on channel. For example, you can mute replies for slack threads.

  • Slack actions in individual (previously only workspace) notifications

  • If you have the enabled the Slack integration for your workspace, you can now programmatically reply to a Slack thread

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug in our insights which was under reporting the support volume on a given date


Designed, built and written by

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Slack auto-responses

Today we’ve shipped auto-responses for Slack – allowing you to set better expectations on response times with customers you support through Slack.

We’ve also made tons of improvements to Slack discussions, check them out in our "New" section below.

Image showing autoresponder in Plain

Previously, auto-responses were only available for threads created through email or via API. To set up Slack auto-responses, head to your workspace settings → auto-responses and create a new one. You can decide if you want to send different auto-responses based on the channel the thread is sourced from, and add conditions to let you decide who receives what message. More detailed instructions are available in our docs.

What's new

  • Mentions, reactions, attachments are now available on Slack discussions

  • You can now resolve Slack discussions, ensuring you can close the loop on discussions relating to threads

  • You can now start a discussion in notification channels

  • You can now disable/enable Slack channels in your Slack settings

  • You can now customise Slack notification settings based on channel. For example, you can mute replies for slack threads.

  • Slack actions in individual (previously only workspace) notifications

  • If you have the enabled the Slack integration for your workspace, you can now programmatically reply to a Slack thread

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug in our insights which was under reporting the support volume on a given date


Designed, built and written by

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Slack auto-responses

Today we’ve shipped auto-responses for Slack – allowing you to set better expectations on response times with customers you support through Slack.

We’ve also made tons of improvements to Slack discussions, check them out in our "New" section below.

Image showing autoresponder in Plain

Previously, auto-responses were only available for threads created through email or via API. To set up Slack auto-responses, head to your workspace settings → auto-responses and create a new one. You can decide if you want to send different auto-responses based on the channel the thread is sourced from, and add conditions to let you decide who receives what message. More detailed instructions are available in our docs.

What's new

  • Mentions, reactions, attachments are now available on Slack discussions

  • You can now resolve Slack discussions, ensuring you can close the loop on discussions relating to threads

  • You can now start a discussion in notification channels

  • You can now disable/enable Slack channels in your Slack settings

  • You can now customise Slack notification settings based on channel. For example, you can mute replies for slack threads.

  • Slack actions in individual (previously only workspace) notifications

  • If you have the enabled the Slack integration for your workspace, you can now programmatically reply to a Slack thread

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug in our insights which was under reporting the support volume on a given date


Designed, built and written by

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

In-Slack actions from notifications

Today we've shipped a quick action bar on notifications, which enable you to take common actions on a thread without leaving Slack.

Image showing actions being taken in Slack

Previously for any action you want to take on a plain thread, you needed to open your browser and open the Plain dashboard. Opening Plain is useful for when you want to draft a response or drive a discussion, but we wanted to make it easier for you to do the majority of the smaller common tasks you’d typically do from Plain – directly in Slack.

In-Slack actions from notifications are now available by default – no action is required to turn them on.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

In-Slack actions from notifications

Today we've shipped a quick action bar on notifications, which enable you to take common actions on a thread without leaving Slack.

Image showing actions being taken in Slack

Previously for any action you want to take on a plain thread, you needed to open your browser and open the Plain dashboard. Opening Plain is useful for when you want to draft a response or drive a discussion, but we wanted to make it easier for you to do the majority of the smaller common tasks you’d typically do from Plain – directly in Slack.

In-Slack actions from notifications are now available by default – no action is required to turn them on.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

In-Slack actions from notifications

Today we've shipped a quick action bar on notifications, which enable you to take common actions on a thread without leaving Slack.

Image showing actions being taken in Slack

Previously for any action you want to take on a plain thread, you needed to open your browser and open the Plain dashboard. Opening Plain is useful for when you want to draft a response or drive a discussion, but we wanted to make it easier for you to do the majority of the smaller common tasks you’d typically do from Plain – directly in Slack.

In-Slack actions from notifications are now available by default – no action is required to turn them on.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Plain broadcasts

Today, we’re excited to announce Plain broadcasts, a free, standalone app that lets you send key updates – like product launches, newsletters, and downtime alerts – to differentiated groups of your customers in Slack.

How does this work alongside Plain?
When a customer responds to a message that you’ve sent with broadcasts in Slack, it’ll be picked up as usual in any channel where you’ve added the Plain app.

How do I use it?
To start using Plain broadcasts to update your customers, connect your Slack workspace to the Plain broadcasts app. You can then build out different audiences and start sending messages to your customer groups.

To find broadcasts from your main Plain workspace, just click your workspace name in the top left corner of Plain, and select “broadcasts” (or cmd+k to search for it).


More detailed instructions are available in our docs.


Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Plain broadcasts

Today, we’re excited to announce Plain broadcasts, a free, standalone app that lets you send key updates – like product launches, newsletters, and downtime alerts – to differentiated groups of your customers in Slack.

How does this work alongside Plain?
When a customer responds to a message that you’ve sent with broadcasts in Slack, it’ll be picked up as usual in any channel where you’ve added the Plain app.

How do I use it?
To start using Plain broadcasts to update your customers, connect your Slack workspace to the Plain broadcasts app. You can then build out different audiences and start sending messages to your customer groups.

To find broadcasts from your main Plain workspace, just click your workspace name in the top left corner of Plain, and select “broadcasts” (or cmd+k to search for it).


More detailed instructions are available in our docs.


Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Plain broadcasts

Today, we’re excited to announce Plain broadcasts, a free, standalone app that lets you send key updates – like product launches, newsletters, and downtime alerts – to differentiated groups of your customers in Slack.

How does this work alongside Plain?
When a customer responds to a message that you’ve sent with broadcasts in Slack, it’ll be picked up as usual in any channel where you’ve added the Plain app.

How do I use it?
To start using Plain broadcasts to update your customers, connect your Slack workspace to the Plain broadcasts app. You can then build out different audiences and start sending messages to your customer groups.

To find broadcasts from your main Plain workspace, just click your workspace name in the top left corner of Plain, and select “broadcasts” (or cmd+k to search for it).


More detailed instructions are available in our docs.


Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

View and reply to Discussions in Plain

If you’re a frequent flyer of our changelog, you’ll have noticed we’ve been shipping updates to discussions over the past few weeks. June shall forever be known as “discussion month” at Plain, because we’ve got another one for you today.

This week, we’ve released the ability to view and reply to discussions – directly in Plain.

Image showing how discussions work at Plain

We initially launched discussions to make it easier for you to collaborate in Plain. We followed-up last week with allowing you to start discussions directly in Plain, and from this week, you can fully lead discussions from within Plain without having to jump back and forward from Slack.

Speed up your workflow by starting, replying to, and viewing discussions without ever leaving Plain. To view and reply to a discussion, just hit “discussion in #channel” on the sidebar and – like magic – you can collaborate with your teammates immediately. We’ve also introduced rich text formatting to discussions so you can respond in the format you need to.

Improvements

  • You can now copy a link to a specific Slack message from any slack message in Plain.

  • When you create a linear issue, it’s description is now pre-filled with the Thread's description (if you’ve enabled AI generated descriptions in your workflow settings)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug which would cause 2 slack messages which are days apart being incorrectly grouped in Plain when using AI ingestion.

  • Fixed a bug where snoozing would sometimes fail due to a rounding error. Time math is hard.

  • Fixed a bug that was causing very long search terms from erroring.


Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

View and reply to Discussions in Plain

If you’re a frequent flyer of our changelog, you’ll have noticed we’ve been shipping updates to discussions over the past few weeks. June shall forever be known as “discussion month” at Plain, because we’ve got another one for you today.

This week, we’ve released the ability to view and reply to discussions – directly in Plain.

Image showing how discussions work at Plain

We initially launched discussions to make it easier for you to collaborate in Plain. We followed-up last week with allowing you to start discussions directly in Plain, and from this week, you can fully lead discussions from within Plain without having to jump back and forward from Slack.

Speed up your workflow by starting, replying to, and viewing discussions without ever leaving Plain. To view and reply to a discussion, just hit “discussion in #channel” on the sidebar and – like magic – you can collaborate with your teammates immediately. We’ve also introduced rich text formatting to discussions so you can respond in the format you need to.

Improvements

  • You can now copy a link to a specific Slack message from any slack message in Plain.

  • When you create a linear issue, it’s description is now pre-filled with the Thread's description (if you’ve enabled AI generated descriptions in your workflow settings)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug which would cause 2 slack messages which are days apart being incorrectly grouped in Plain when using AI ingestion.

  • Fixed a bug where snoozing would sometimes fail due to a rounding error. Time math is hard.

  • Fixed a bug that was causing very long search terms from erroring.


Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

View and reply to Discussions in Plain

If you’re a frequent flyer of our changelog, you’ll have noticed we’ve been shipping updates to discussions over the past few weeks. June shall forever be known as “discussion month” at Plain, because we’ve got another one for you today.

This week, we’ve released the ability to view and reply to discussions – directly in Plain.

Image showing how discussions work at Plain

We initially launched discussions to make it easier for you to collaborate in Plain. We followed-up last week with allowing you to start discussions directly in Plain, and from this week, you can fully lead discussions from within Plain without having to jump back and forward from Slack.

Speed up your workflow by starting, replying to, and viewing discussions without ever leaving Plain. To view and reply to a discussion, just hit “discussion in #channel” on the sidebar and – like magic – you can collaborate with your teammates immediately. We’ve also introduced rich text formatting to discussions so you can respond in the format you need to.

Improvements

  • You can now copy a link to a specific Slack message from any slack message in Plain.

  • When you create a linear issue, it’s description is now pre-filled with the Thread's description (if you’ve enabled AI generated descriptions in your workflow settings)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug which would cause 2 slack messages which are days apart being incorrectly grouped in Plain when using AI ingestion.

  • Fixed a bug where snoozing would sometimes fail due to a rounding error. Time math is hard.

  • Fixed a bug that was causing very long search terms from erroring.


Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Starting discussions in Plain, and AI-generated titles for threads

This week we’ve improved our discussions feature – allowing you to start new discussions directly in Plain. Move faster with your team by creating discussions directly in your Plain threads.

We’ve also shipped AI-generated titles for threads. Immediately see at a glance what a thread is about, and move through your queue even faster.

Starting discussions in Plain

A few weeks ago with the introduction of discussions, we made it easier for you to collaborate on Plain threads with your team. Today, we’re building on those foundations – allowing you to start those discussions directly in Plain threads.

To start discussions directly in Plain, you’ll need to first add Plain to the channels you want to use for discussions. Don’t worry, we’ll separate those from the channels that are dedicated to handling customer requests. Check out our docs for detailed instructions.

AI-generated titles for threads

With this new release, if you’ve enabled thread titles (settings → workflow), we’ll automatically generate titles for threads created without a title through our API or via Slack.

This is particularly useful for threads that originate in Slack. Slack threads will no longer show under unactionable titles like “Slack message in #channel-name”. –Instead, they’ll be automatically generated for you based on the content of the thread.

Save time and make your support queue easier to review – regardless of where your threads originate from.

What's new

  • Easily migrate from Freshdesk thanks to our new Freshdesk importer, which will allow you to import all tickets, customers and labels into Plain

  • We’ve added two new webhooks for sent and received Slack messages

  • Added SLA compliance for first response time and next response time, as well as breached thread lists

  • New “all time customers helped” counter now available in your Insights tab at the bottom, because the 90s internet was awesome

Improvements

  • Fixed a bug which caused tenants to overflow in the sidebar if you had too many

  • When you pick a project upon creating a Linear issue, that is now “sticky” and will preserve it’s value for the next Linear issue you create

  • Introduced new time periods for reporting – you can now look back 30, 60, and 120 days

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Starting discussions in Plain, and AI-generated titles for threads

This week we’ve improved our discussions feature – allowing you to start new discussions directly in Plain. Move faster with your team by creating discussions directly in your Plain threads.

We’ve also shipped AI-generated titles for threads. Immediately see at a glance what a thread is about, and move through your queue even faster.

Starting discussions in Plain

A few weeks ago with the introduction of discussions, we made it easier for you to collaborate on Plain threads with your team. Today, we’re building on those foundations – allowing you to start those discussions directly in Plain threads.

To start discussions directly in Plain, you’ll need to first add Plain to the channels you want to use for discussions. Don’t worry, we’ll separate those from the channels that are dedicated to handling customer requests. Check out our docs for detailed instructions.

AI-generated titles for threads

With this new release, if you’ve enabled thread titles (settings → workflow), we’ll automatically generate titles for threads created without a title through our API or via Slack.

This is particularly useful for threads that originate in Slack. Slack threads will no longer show under unactionable titles like “Slack message in #channel-name”. –Instead, they’ll be automatically generated for you based on the content of the thread.

Save time and make your support queue easier to review – regardless of where your threads originate from.

What's new

  • Easily migrate from Freshdesk thanks to our new Freshdesk importer, which will allow you to import all tickets, customers and labels into Plain

  • We’ve added two new webhooks for sent and received Slack messages

  • Added SLA compliance for first response time and next response time, as well as breached thread lists

  • New “all time customers helped” counter now available in your Insights tab at the bottom, because the 90s internet was awesome

Improvements

  • Fixed a bug which caused tenants to overflow in the sidebar if you had too many

  • When you pick a project upon creating a Linear issue, that is now “sticky” and will preserve it’s value for the next Linear issue you create

  • Introduced new time periods for reporting – you can now look back 30, 60, and 120 days

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Starting discussions in Plain, and AI-generated titles for threads

This week we’ve improved our discussions feature – allowing you to start new discussions directly in Plain. Move faster with your team by creating discussions directly in your Plain threads.

We’ve also shipped AI-generated titles for threads. Immediately see at a glance what a thread is about, and move through your queue even faster.

Starting discussions in Plain

A few weeks ago with the introduction of discussions, we made it easier for you to collaborate on Plain threads with your team. Today, we’re building on those foundations – allowing you to start those discussions directly in Plain threads.

To start discussions directly in Plain, you’ll need to first add Plain to the channels you want to use for discussions. Don’t worry, we’ll separate those from the channels that are dedicated to handling customer requests. Check out our docs for detailed instructions.

AI-generated titles for threads

With this new release, if you’ve enabled thread titles (settings → workflow), we’ll automatically generate titles for threads created without a title through our API or via Slack.

This is particularly useful for threads that originate in Slack. Slack threads will no longer show under unactionable titles like “Slack message in #channel-name”. –Instead, they’ll be automatically generated for you based on the content of the thread.

Save time and make your support queue easier to review – regardless of where your threads originate from.

What's new

  • Easily migrate from Freshdesk thanks to our new Freshdesk importer, which will allow you to import all tickets, customers and labels into Plain

  • We’ve added two new webhooks for sent and received Slack messages

  • Added SLA compliance for first response time and next response time, as well as breached thread lists

  • New “all time customers helped” counter now available in your Insights tab at the bottom, because the 90s internet was awesome

Improvements

  • Fixed a bug which caused tenants to overflow in the sidebar if you had too many

  • When you pick a project upon creating a Linear issue, that is now “sticky” and will preserve it’s value for the next Linear issue you create

  • Introduced new time periods for reporting – you can now look back 30, 60, and 120 days

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Kate Donnellan

Marketing

Conditional autoresponses and thread discussions

This week we’re releasing conditional auto-responses, giving you more control over which customers receive your automatic replies.

We’ve also shipped a new thread discussions feature that makes it easier to discuss support requests with your team.

Conditional auto-responses

A few months ago, we released auto-responses, letting you reply to all new threads with a custom message. With today’s release, you can configure multiple auto-responses with customizable conditions to let you decide who receives what message.

You can add conditions based on your business hours and the customer’s tier. You can use this, for example, to let your Enterprise customers know how to reach you out of hours, while letting Free tier customers know to expect a response during your regular support hours.

If you have a thread that matches the conditions for multiple auto-responses, then only the first matching auto-response is sent. If you don’t set any conditions at all, the same auto-response will go to all customers. We delay the auto-response by 60 seconds to enable you to make any asynchronous changes (i.e. as a response to our webhooks) that might impact auto-response eligibility.

You can configure auto-responses in Settings → Auto-responses.

Thread discussions

Image showing discussions in Plain

We’re making it easier to discuss Plain threads with your team.

When you paste a link to a Plain thread in Slack, we’ll now unfurl the link to provide a brief preview of the Plain thread.

We’ll also create a reference to the Slack message within the Plain thread, allowing you to quickly navigate to any ongoing discussions around a particular thread. This reference or the discussion will not be visible to the customer.

Links will not be unfurled if the link is posted by someone who is not a user in Plain, posted in a private channel Plain doesn't have access to, or posted in a Slack Connect channel.

This setting is now available for anyone to use. You can turn it off by heading to Settings → Slack.

What's new

  • Next response time SLAs: Once you’ve created a first response time SLA, you can add an additional next response time SLA which will monitor and notify when a response is required for any subsequent inbound messages

  • Spam handling improvements: You can now see which customers you’ve previously marked as spam from Settings → Spam. You can then navigate to their customer page, or unmark them as spam directly from the list.

Improvements

  • Thread ID is now provided as part of customer card requests. You can now enhance your current customer cards or have entirely new cards with thread-specific information

  • You can now provide default values for Thread Fields.

  • You can now create new labels from within a thread.

  • You can now click customer names in the timeline entry to take you to their customer page. This is especially useful when you’ve got multiple customers on a single thread.

Bug fixes

  • Thread ID is now provided as part of customer card requests. You can now enhance your current customer cards or have entirely new cards with thread-specific information

  • You can now provide default values for Thread Fields.

  • You can now create new labels from within a thread.

  • You can now click customer names in the timeline entry to take you to their customer page. This is especially useful when you’ve got multiple customers on a single thread.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Conditional autoresponses and thread discussions

This week we’re releasing conditional auto-responses, giving you more control over which customers receive your automatic replies.

We’ve also shipped a new thread discussions feature that makes it easier to discuss support requests with your team.

Conditional auto-responses

A few months ago, we released auto-responses, letting you reply to all new threads with a custom message. With today’s release, you can configure multiple auto-responses with customizable conditions to let you decide who receives what message.

You can add conditions based on your business hours and the customer’s tier. You can use this, for example, to let your Enterprise customers know how to reach you out of hours, while letting Free tier customers know to expect a response during your regular support hours.

If you have a thread that matches the conditions for multiple auto-responses, then only the first matching auto-response is sent. If you don’t set any conditions at all, the same auto-response will go to all customers. We delay the auto-response by 60 seconds to enable you to make any asynchronous changes (i.e. as a response to our webhooks) that might impact auto-response eligibility.

You can configure auto-responses in Settings → Auto-responses.

Thread discussions

Image showing discussions in Plain

We’re making it easier to discuss Plain threads with your team.

When you paste a link to a Plain thread in Slack, we’ll now unfurl the link to provide a brief preview of the Plain thread.

We’ll also create a reference to the Slack message within the Plain thread, allowing you to quickly navigate to any ongoing discussions around a particular thread. This reference or the discussion will not be visible to the customer.

Links will not be unfurled if the link is posted by someone who is not a user in Plain, posted in a private channel Plain doesn't have access to, or posted in a Slack Connect channel.

This setting is now available for anyone to use. You can turn it off by heading to Settings → Slack.

What's new

  • Next response time SLAs: Once you’ve created a first response time SLA, you can add an additional next response time SLA which will monitor and notify when a response is required for any subsequent inbound messages

  • Spam handling improvements: You can now see which customers you’ve previously marked as spam from Settings → Spam. You can then navigate to their customer page, or unmark them as spam directly from the list.

Improvements

  • Thread ID is now provided as part of customer card requests. You can now enhance your current customer cards or have entirely new cards with thread-specific information

  • You can now provide default values for Thread Fields.

  • You can now create new labels from within a thread.

  • You can now click customer names in the timeline entry to take you to their customer page. This is especially useful when you’ve got multiple customers on a single thread.

Bug fixes

  • Thread ID is now provided as part of customer card requests. You can now enhance your current customer cards or have entirely new cards with thread-specific information

  • You can now provide default values for Thread Fields.

  • You can now create new labels from within a thread.

  • You can now click customer names in the timeline entry to take you to their customer page. This is especially useful when you’ve got multiple customers on a single thread.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Conditional autoresponses and thread discussions

This week we’re releasing conditional auto-responses, giving you more control over which customers receive your automatic replies.

We’ve also shipped a new thread discussions feature that makes it easier to discuss support requests with your team.

Conditional auto-responses

A few months ago, we released auto-responses, letting you reply to all new threads with a custom message. With today’s release, you can configure multiple auto-responses with customizable conditions to let you decide who receives what message.

You can add conditions based on your business hours and the customer’s tier. You can use this, for example, to let your Enterprise customers know how to reach you out of hours, while letting Free tier customers know to expect a response during your regular support hours.

If you have a thread that matches the conditions for multiple auto-responses, then only the first matching auto-response is sent. If you don’t set any conditions at all, the same auto-response will go to all customers. We delay the auto-response by 60 seconds to enable you to make any asynchronous changes (i.e. as a response to our webhooks) that might impact auto-response eligibility.

You can configure auto-responses in Settings → Auto-responses.

Thread discussions

Image showing discussions in Plain

We’re making it easier to discuss Plain threads with your team.

When you paste a link to a Plain thread in Slack, we’ll now unfurl the link to provide a brief preview of the Plain thread.

We’ll also create a reference to the Slack message within the Plain thread, allowing you to quickly navigate to any ongoing discussions around a particular thread. This reference or the discussion will not be visible to the customer.

Links will not be unfurled if the link is posted by someone who is not a user in Plain, posted in a private channel Plain doesn't have access to, or posted in a Slack Connect channel.

This setting is now available for anyone to use. You can turn it off by heading to Settings → Slack.

What's new

  • Next response time SLAs: Once you’ve created a first response time SLA, you can add an additional next response time SLA which will monitor and notify when a response is required for any subsequent inbound messages

  • Spam handling improvements: You can now see which customers you’ve previously marked as spam from Settings → Spam. You can then navigate to their customer page, or unmark them as spam directly from the list.

Improvements

  • Thread ID is now provided as part of customer card requests. You can now enhance your current customer cards or have entirely new cards with thread-specific information

  • You can now provide default values for Thread Fields.

  • You can now create new labels from within a thread.

  • You can now click customer names in the timeline entry to take you to their customer page. This is especially useful when you’ve got multiple customers on a single thread.

Bug fixes

  • Thread ID is now provided as part of customer card requests. You can now enhance your current customer cards or have entirely new cards with thread-specific information

  • You can now provide default values for Thread Fields.

  • You can now create new labels from within a thread.

  • You can now click customer names in the timeline entry to take you to their customer page. This is especially useful when you’ve got multiple customers on a single thread.

Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Insights

Image showing insights in Plain

Insights gives you a detailed view of all your support and helps you to spot trends, identify issues and ensure that every customer is getting the right level of support.

Insights help you to answer questions like:

  • Are we prioritizing support requests correctly?

  • What product areas are creating most of our support volume?

  • Are we meeting all of our SLAs?

  • What companies are we speaking with the most?

  • Are we becoming more efficient?

Have more questions? Click into the data to keep exploring yourself.

Using Insights

Understand your support workload by following metrics:

  1. Support volume: The number of threads in your queue at any given point in time.

  2. First response time: How quickly your customers receive a first reply from you.

  3. Resolution time: How long it takes you to resolve support requests.

Each metric is broken down to display the median and 90th percentile for either the current day, last 7 days or last 28 days.

You will also see a volume breakdown of each metric by Company, Tier, or Label and whether the metric is trending upward or downward.

Image showing how company insights work in Plain

Check in at a glance

The overview immediately tells you if you're staying on top of the queue, keeping your first response time down and resolving threads in a reasonable time.

Overview of insights in Plain

Dig in and explore

Click into any attribute to see even more metrics such as Tier, Label, Company, or Channel.

For example, you might want to filter by Tier to see how your resolution time trends across Enterprise, Paid and Free Tier customers.

Image showing insights by label in Plain

Integrated everywhere

Wherever you are in Plain, hover over an attribute and see data right away. Click 'View more' and you’ll be directed to deeper metrics.

Image showing isights by company tierImage showing insights into support volume

More information on each metrics and how to use Insights is in our docs.

This is just the beginning. More metrics related to Next Response Time, SLA Compliance, and much more is coming soon 👀.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Insights

Image showing insights in Plain

Insights gives you a detailed view of all your support and helps you to spot trends, identify issues and ensure that every customer is getting the right level of support.

Insights help you to answer questions like:

  • Are we prioritizing support requests correctly?

  • What product areas are creating most of our support volume?

  • Are we meeting all of our SLAs?

  • What companies are we speaking with the most?

  • Are we becoming more efficient?

Have more questions? Click into the data to keep exploring yourself.

Using Insights

Understand your support workload by following metrics:

  1. Support volume: The number of threads in your queue at any given point in time.

  2. First response time: How quickly your customers receive a first reply from you.

  3. Resolution time: How long it takes you to resolve support requests.

Each metric is broken down to display the median and 90th percentile for either the current day, last 7 days or last 28 days.

You will also see a volume breakdown of each metric by Company, Tier, or Label and whether the metric is trending upward or downward.

Image showing how company insights work in Plain

Check in at a glance

The overview immediately tells you if you're staying on top of the queue, keeping your first response time down and resolving threads in a reasonable time.

Overview of insights in Plain

Dig in and explore

Click into any attribute to see even more metrics such as Tier, Label, Company, or Channel.

For example, you might want to filter by Tier to see how your resolution time trends across Enterprise, Paid and Free Tier customers.

Image showing insights by label in Plain

Integrated everywhere

Wherever you are in Plain, hover over an attribute and see data right away. Click 'View more' and you’ll be directed to deeper metrics.

Image showing isights by company tierImage showing insights into support volume

More information on each metrics and how to use Insights is in our docs.

This is just the beginning. More metrics related to Next Response Time, SLA Compliance, and much more is coming soon 👀.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Insights

Image showing insights in Plain

Insights gives you a detailed view of all your support and helps you to spot trends, identify issues and ensure that every customer is getting the right level of support.

Insights help you to answer questions like:

  • Are we prioritizing support requests correctly?

  • What product areas are creating most of our support volume?

  • Are we meeting all of our SLAs?

  • What companies are we speaking with the most?

  • Are we becoming more efficient?

Have more questions? Click into the data to keep exploring yourself.

Using Insights

Understand your support workload by following metrics:

  1. Support volume: The number of threads in your queue at any given point in time.

  2. First response time: How quickly your customers receive a first reply from you.

  3. Resolution time: How long it takes you to resolve support requests.

Each metric is broken down to display the median and 90th percentile for either the current day, last 7 days or last 28 days.

You will also see a volume breakdown of each metric by Company, Tier, or Label and whether the metric is trending upward or downward.

Image showing how company insights work in Plain

Check in at a glance

The overview immediately tells you if you're staying on top of the queue, keeping your first response time down and resolving threads in a reasonable time.

Overview of insights in Plain

Dig in and explore

Click into any attribute to see even more metrics such as Tier, Label, Company, or Channel.

For example, you might want to filter by Tier to see how your resolution time trends across Enterprise, Paid and Free Tier customers.

Image showing insights by label in Plain

Integrated everywhere

Wherever you are in Plain, hover over an attribute and see data right away. Click 'View more' and you’ll be directed to deeper metrics.

Image showing isights by company tierImage showing insights into support volume

More information on each metrics and how to use Insights is in our docs.

This is just the beginning. More metrics related to Next Response Time, SLA Compliance, and much more is coming soon 👀.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Salesforce and Zendesk importer

Sync or migrate your data to Plain in just a few clicks with our latest Salesforce and Zendesk importers.

Our Salesforce importer allows you to create Customers and Tenants in Plain from Contacts and Accounts in Salesforce so you have the exact same account hierarchy in your workspace when you receive support requests from your customers.

Additionally, our Zendesk importer lets you migrate support tickets, customers, and tags from Zendesk to Plain so you don’t lose a single piece of context when switching over. Instructions on how to use both importers are available in our docs under Integrations.

We’ve also shipped a few significant improvements to the Plain app that you won’t want to miss👇.


What's new

  • A new Customer page shows you all support requests submitted from an end user (you can also see all support requests related to a Company as well).

  • Custom snooze durations now allow you to decide the period of time that you want a thread to be snoozed for - by hour, day, week, or month.

Improvements

  • We've improved our handling of Slack mentions more suitable for Plain deployments at large scale. You can now @-mention users in Slack channel even with thousands of users in them.

  • All attachments created in Plain (both from your workspace users and from your customers) are now automatically scanned for viruses. We will warn you if any attachment is a potentially malicious file.

  • When you create a new support request with a customer, the thread will be empty so you have a blank slate to start a new conversation.

  • A new ‘Open in Slack’ button allows you to open a support request in Slack directly from Plain.

  • We have upgraded our AI features to use the latest GPT-4o model.

  • Across the Plain app, badges are now interactive and will direct you to a filtered view so you can drill in on support requests by label, priority level, Tier, and much more.

Designed, built and written by

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

Salesforce and Zendesk importer

Sync or migrate your data to Plain in just a few clicks with our latest Salesforce and Zendesk importers.

Our Salesforce importer allows you to create Customers and Tenants in Plain from Contacts and Accounts in Salesforce so you have the exact same account hierarchy in your workspace when you receive support requests from your customers.

Additionally, our Zendesk importer lets you migrate support tickets, customers, and tags from Zendesk to Plain so you don’t lose a single piece of context when switching over. Instructions on how to use both importers are available in our docs under Integrations.

We’ve also shipped a few significant improvements to the Plain app that you won’t want to miss👇.


What's new

  • A new Customer page shows you all support requests submitted from an end user (you can also see all support requests related to a Company as well).

  • Custom snooze durations now allow you to decide the period of time that you want a thread to be snoozed for - by hour, day, week, or month.

Improvements

  • We've improved our handling of Slack mentions more suitable for Plain deployments at large scale. You can now @-mention users in Slack channel even with thousands of users in them.

  • All attachments created in Plain (both from your workspace users and from your customers) are now automatically scanned for viruses. We will warn you if any attachment is a potentially malicious file.

  • When you create a new support request with a customer, the thread will be empty so you have a blank slate to start a new conversation.

  • A new ‘Open in Slack’ button allows you to open a support request in Slack directly from Plain.

  • We have upgraded our AI features to use the latest GPT-4o model.

  • Across the Plain app, badges are now interactive and will direct you to a filtered view so you can drill in on support requests by label, priority level, Tier, and much more.

Designed, built and written by

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

Salesforce and Zendesk importer

Sync or migrate your data to Plain in just a few clicks with our latest Salesforce and Zendesk importers.

Our Salesforce importer allows you to create Customers and Tenants in Plain from Contacts and Accounts in Salesforce so you have the exact same account hierarchy in your workspace when you receive support requests from your customers.

Additionally, our Zendesk importer lets you migrate support tickets, customers, and tags from Zendesk to Plain so you don’t lose a single piece of context when switching over. Instructions on how to use both importers are available in our docs under Integrations.

We’ve also shipped a few significant improvements to the Plain app that you won’t want to miss👇.


What's new

  • A new Customer page shows you all support requests submitted from an end user (you can also see all support requests related to a Company as well).

  • Custom snooze durations now allow you to decide the period of time that you want a thread to be snoozed for - by hour, day, week, or month.

Improvements

  • We've improved our handling of Slack mentions more suitable for Plain deployments at large scale. You can now @-mention users in Slack channel even with thousands of users in them.

  • All attachments created in Plain (both from your workspace users and from your customers) are now automatically scanned for viruses. We will warn you if any attachment is a potentially malicious file.

  • When you create a new support request with a customer, the thread will be empty so you have a blank slate to start a new conversation.

  • A new ‘Open in Slack’ button allows you to open a support request in Slack directly from Plain.

  • We have upgraded our AI features to use the latest GPT-4o model.

  • Across the Plain app, badges are now interactive and will direct you to a filtered view so you can drill in on support requests by label, priority level, Tier, and much more.

Designed, built and written by

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

Tenants, Tiers & SLAs

Today, we’re releasing three foundational building blocks to make Plain even better for B2B products: Tenants, Tiers, and SLAs.

Tenants

In most B2B SaaS products, users are grouped into workspaces or similar concepts. Our new Tenants feature helps you group your customers in Plain the same way they are grouped in your product. Whether that’s by Workspace, Team , Project or Organization, you can now mirror these concepts in Plain.

This removes the need to context switch to an internal dashboard just to find out which tenant (or team) a customer belongs to.

For more detail, view our docs.

Tiers

You might offer different pricing tiers or levels of support to customers. Now, you can directly map every tenant, customer, and support request to a Tier in Plain, making it much easier to prioritize requests for certain Tiers (e.g. “Enterprise first, then Pro, then everyone else”).

You can also set a default Tier that will automatically apply to all customers.

To configure Tiers, go to SettingsTiers.

SLAs

You can now set up SLAs for first response times. SLAs will notify you via Slack or Discord when a support request has gone unanswered for too long and is close to breaching your SLA.

You can configure SLAs to match your needs: You can set the same SLA for everyone, or set granular SLAs per priority level, tenant or tier.

You can also choose to apply business hours or have SLAs apply 24x7. You can manage Tiers & SLAs manually in the app or using the API. To configure SLAs, you can also find these in SettingsTiers.

For more detail, view our docs.


Improvements

  • You can now “Mark as spam” if you right click on a thread from the queue.

  • We now allow replyToThread API mutation to reply to threads when the last message in the thread was a user.

  • We now allow calling createThread with empty components to create a new empty thread.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug sending duplicate notifications when new thread notifications were disabled.

  • Fix a timestamp not immediately updating on re-sorting of queues.

  • Fixed a bug where a threads text would be stale.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Tenants, Tiers & SLAs

Today, we’re releasing three foundational building blocks to make Plain even better for B2B products: Tenants, Tiers, and SLAs.

Tenants

In most B2B SaaS products, users are grouped into workspaces or similar concepts. Our new Tenants feature helps you group your customers in Plain the same way they are grouped in your product. Whether that’s by Workspace, Team , Project or Organization, you can now mirror these concepts in Plain.

This removes the need to context switch to an internal dashboard just to find out which tenant (or team) a customer belongs to.

For more detail, view our docs.

Tiers

You might offer different pricing tiers or levels of support to customers. Now, you can directly map every tenant, customer, and support request to a Tier in Plain, making it much easier to prioritize requests for certain Tiers (e.g. “Enterprise first, then Pro, then everyone else”).

You can also set a default Tier that will automatically apply to all customers.

To configure Tiers, go to SettingsTiers.

SLAs

You can now set up SLAs for first response times. SLAs will notify you via Slack or Discord when a support request has gone unanswered for too long and is close to breaching your SLA.

You can configure SLAs to match your needs: You can set the same SLA for everyone, or set granular SLAs per priority level, tenant or tier.

You can also choose to apply business hours or have SLAs apply 24x7. You can manage Tiers & SLAs manually in the app or using the API. To configure SLAs, you can also find these in SettingsTiers.

For more detail, view our docs.


Improvements

  • You can now “Mark as spam” if you right click on a thread from the queue.

  • We now allow replyToThread API mutation to reply to threads when the last message in the thread was a user.

  • We now allow calling createThread with empty components to create a new empty thread.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug sending duplicate notifications when new thread notifications were disabled.

  • Fix a timestamp not immediately updating on re-sorting of queues.

  • Fixed a bug where a threads text would be stale.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Tenants, Tiers & SLAs

Today, we’re releasing three foundational building blocks to make Plain even better for B2B products: Tenants, Tiers, and SLAs.

Tenants

In most B2B SaaS products, users are grouped into workspaces or similar concepts. Our new Tenants feature helps you group your customers in Plain the same way they are grouped in your product. Whether that’s by Workspace, Team , Project or Organization, you can now mirror these concepts in Plain.

This removes the need to context switch to an internal dashboard just to find out which tenant (or team) a customer belongs to.

For more detail, view our docs.

Tiers

You might offer different pricing tiers or levels of support to customers. Now, you can directly map every tenant, customer, and support request to a Tier in Plain, making it much easier to prioritize requests for certain Tiers (e.g. “Enterprise first, then Pro, then everyone else”).

You can also set a default Tier that will automatically apply to all customers.

To configure Tiers, go to SettingsTiers.

SLAs

You can now set up SLAs for first response times. SLAs will notify you via Slack or Discord when a support request has gone unanswered for too long and is close to breaching your SLA.

You can configure SLAs to match your needs: You can set the same SLA for everyone, or set granular SLAs per priority level, tenant or tier.

You can also choose to apply business hours or have SLAs apply 24x7. You can manage Tiers & SLAs manually in the app or using the API. To configure SLAs, you can also find these in SettingsTiers.

For more detail, view our docs.


Improvements

  • You can now “Mark as spam” if you right click on a thread from the queue.

  • We now allow replyToThread API mutation to reply to threads when the last message in the thread was a user.

  • We now allow calling createThread with empty components to create a new empty thread.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug sending duplicate notifications when new thread notifications were disabled.

  • Fix a timestamp not immediately updating on re-sorting of queues.

  • Fixed a bug where a threads text would be stale.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Thread fields

Today, we're making the core of Plain's data model completely extensible with the introduction of thread fields.

Thread fields allow you to customise the data stored on a thread object to your liking. For example, you can use thread fields to:

  • Keep track of the product area that the customer is asking about

  • Save important IDs and details about the support request.

  • Track simple todos before snoozing a support request for later

While many products have a "custom fields" concept, they often feel secondary – custom – to their products, rather than native and fully integrated. With our thread fields feature, we want to bring the same programmatic extensibility our customers already love about Plain, to our data model.

Thread fields in Plain are:

Completely integrated into the Plain workflow. You can either set their values in the sidebar, or we'll automatically ask you to fill in any required fields using just a couple of keystrokes (or clicks, if that's your thing) when you mark a thread as Done. Try it – it's so fast it feels a little magical. ✨

Nestable. You can show fields conditionally based on the value of a different field. For example, setting a Product Area field to Dashboard can then show another field Dashboard Version with a dropdown list of options.

AI-powered. You can enable individual fields to be populated with AI using information in the thread.

A core part of our API. As with all Plain features, you can interact with fields both in the app and using our API.

Start using thread fields

Thread fields are powered by a strict schema that you control, making them powerful yet predictable:

  • Fields can be of a specific type (e.g. text, boolean, dropdown etc.).

  • As noted above, fields can be nested to show conditional fields based on the selected value of a different field.

  • Fields can be required before a thread can be marked as done to encourage good data collection. If you try to mark a thread as done before completing the required fields, a small screen appears to allow you to quickly fill out required fields and move on to the next thread.

You can implement thread fields by heading to Settings → Thread fields, or read more in our docs or API reference.We're really excited to be releasing this feature, and can't wait to hear what you think. We already have a long list of further improvements planned and can't wait to share them with you soon.


Improvements

  • We now show the full outbound message in Slack notifications.

  • The Companies page now has infinite scroll to make it a bit easier to browse.

  • Discord notifications include a link for Slack threads.

Bug fixes

  • Custom built auto-responders no longer impact first-response time calculations.

  • Fixed a bug which prevent some Slack threads from not being summarised via AI.

  • Fixed a bug caused by Slack users changing their email address.

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Thread fields

Today, we're making the core of Plain's data model completely extensible with the introduction of thread fields.

Thread fields allow you to customise the data stored on a thread object to your liking. For example, you can use thread fields to:

  • Keep track of the product area that the customer is asking about

  • Save important IDs and details about the support request.

  • Track simple todos before snoozing a support request for later

While many products have a "custom fields" concept, they often feel secondary – custom – to their products, rather than native and fully integrated. With our thread fields feature, we want to bring the same programmatic extensibility our customers already love about Plain, to our data model.

Thread fields in Plain are:

Completely integrated into the Plain workflow. You can either set their values in the sidebar, or we'll automatically ask you to fill in any required fields using just a couple of keystrokes (or clicks, if that's your thing) when you mark a thread as Done. Try it – it's so fast it feels a little magical. ✨

Nestable. You can show fields conditionally based on the value of a different field. For example, setting a Product Area field to Dashboard can then show another field Dashboard Version with a dropdown list of options.

AI-powered. You can enable individual fields to be populated with AI using information in the thread.

A core part of our API. As with all Plain features, you can interact with fields both in the app and using our API.

Start using thread fields

Thread fields are powered by a strict schema that you control, making them powerful yet predictable:

  • Fields can be of a specific type (e.g. text, boolean, dropdown etc.).

  • As noted above, fields can be nested to show conditional fields based on the selected value of a different field.

  • Fields can be required before a thread can be marked as done to encourage good data collection. If you try to mark a thread as done before completing the required fields, a small screen appears to allow you to quickly fill out required fields and move on to the next thread.

You can implement thread fields by heading to Settings → Thread fields, or read more in our docs or API reference.We're really excited to be releasing this feature, and can't wait to hear what you think. We already have a long list of further improvements planned and can't wait to share them with you soon.


Improvements

  • We now show the full outbound message in Slack notifications.

  • The Companies page now has infinite scroll to make it a bit easier to browse.

  • Discord notifications include a link for Slack threads.

Bug fixes

  • Custom built auto-responders no longer impact first-response time calculations.

  • Fixed a bug which prevent some Slack threads from not being summarised via AI.

  • Fixed a bug caused by Slack users changing their email address.

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Thread fields

Today, we're making the core of Plain's data model completely extensible with the introduction of thread fields.

Thread fields allow you to customise the data stored on a thread object to your liking. For example, you can use thread fields to:

  • Keep track of the product area that the customer is asking about

  • Save important IDs and details about the support request.

  • Track simple todos before snoozing a support request for later

While many products have a "custom fields" concept, they often feel secondary – custom – to their products, rather than native and fully integrated. With our thread fields feature, we want to bring the same programmatic extensibility our customers already love about Plain, to our data model.

Thread fields in Plain are:

Completely integrated into the Plain workflow. You can either set their values in the sidebar, or we'll automatically ask you to fill in any required fields using just a couple of keystrokes (or clicks, if that's your thing) when you mark a thread as Done. Try it – it's so fast it feels a little magical. ✨

Nestable. You can show fields conditionally based on the value of a different field. For example, setting a Product Area field to Dashboard can then show another field Dashboard Version with a dropdown list of options.

AI-powered. You can enable individual fields to be populated with AI using information in the thread.

A core part of our API. As with all Plain features, you can interact with fields both in the app and using our API.

Start using thread fields

Thread fields are powered by a strict schema that you control, making them powerful yet predictable:

  • Fields can be of a specific type (e.g. text, boolean, dropdown etc.).

  • As noted above, fields can be nested to show conditional fields based on the selected value of a different field.

  • Fields can be required before a thread can be marked as done to encourage good data collection. If you try to mark a thread as done before completing the required fields, a small screen appears to allow you to quickly fill out required fields and move on to the next thread.

You can implement thread fields by heading to Settings → Thread fields, or read more in our docs or API reference.We're really excited to be releasing this feature, and can't wait to hear what you think. We already have a long list of further improvements planned and can't wait to share them with you soon.


Improvements

  • We now show the full outbound message in Slack notifications.

  • The Companies page now has infinite scroll to make it a bit easier to browse.

  • Discord notifications include a link for Slack threads.

Bug fixes

  • Custom built auto-responders no longer impact first-response time calculations.

  • Fixed a bug which prevent some Slack threads from not being summarised via AI.

  • Fixed a bug caused by Slack users changing their email address.

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Companies

Showing companies in Plain

We have released some improvements to Company support in Plain this week.

You can now search for companies in our search bar. Selecting a company will take you to a page showing all the current threads for that company.

Additionally we have released a companies page which shows all the companies in your Plain workspace along with a summary of how many threads are in ‘Todo’ or in ‘Snoozed’. This can be found in the left hand side navigation menu with the label ‘Companies’.

This is just the start of what we have planned for this page, so watch this space for more improvements coming soon.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Companies

Showing companies in Plain

We have released some improvements to Company support in Plain this week.

You can now search for companies in our search bar. Selecting a company will take you to a page showing all the current threads for that company.

Additionally we have released a companies page which shows all the companies in your Plain workspace along with a summary of how many threads are in ‘Todo’ or in ‘Snoozed’. This can be found in the left hand side navigation menu with the label ‘Companies’.

This is just the start of what we have planned for this page, so watch this space for more improvements coming soon.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Companies

Showing companies in Plain

We have released some improvements to Company support in Plain this week.

You can now search for companies in our search bar. Selecting a company will take you to a page showing all the current threads for that company.

Additionally we have released a companies page which shows all the companies in your Plain workspace along with a summary of how many threads are in ‘Todo’ or in ‘Snoozed’. This can be found in the left hand side navigation menu with the label ‘Companies’.

This is just the start of what we have planned for this page, so watch this space for more improvements coming soon.

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Multiple Slack workspaces & AI message grouping

Image showing multiple slack workspaces

We now support connecting multiple Slack workspaces into your Plain workspace, with different ingestion settings for each Slack workspace.

If you have Slack Connect channels in your main Slack workspace but also maintain a separate Slack Community workspace, you can now track customer requests from both of them in Plain.

Moreover, we’ve added two new ways of ingesting Slack messages into Plain:

The AI mode automatically groups messages based on whether they belong together, leveraging an AI model to determine if they are part of the same conversation. When enabled, messages will be grouped into one thread, or split into different ones, depending on the message contents.

One-to-one mode always associates a Slack message on a channel and its thread to a single Plain thread.

This is in addition to our existing modes, Manual (e.g. by leaving a :ticket: emoji), and Automatic, which ingests all messages.


What's new

  • You can now automatically sync your Zendesk support requests and customers into Plain, so that your transition is smoother 😏

Bug fixes

  • We mistakenly named one of our section headers “TODOodo” instead of “TODO”, oops 🙈


Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Multiple Slack workspaces & AI message grouping

Image showing multiple slack workspaces

We now support connecting multiple Slack workspaces into your Plain workspace, with different ingestion settings for each Slack workspace.

If you have Slack Connect channels in your main Slack workspace but also maintain a separate Slack Community workspace, you can now track customer requests from both of them in Plain.

Moreover, we’ve added two new ways of ingesting Slack messages into Plain:

The AI mode automatically groups messages based on whether they belong together, leveraging an AI model to determine if they are part of the same conversation. When enabled, messages will be grouped into one thread, or split into different ones, depending on the message contents.

One-to-one mode always associates a Slack message on a channel and its thread to a single Plain thread.

This is in addition to our existing modes, Manual (e.g. by leaving a :ticket: emoji), and Automatic, which ingests all messages.


What's new

  • You can now automatically sync your Zendesk support requests and customers into Plain, so that your transition is smoother 😏

Bug fixes

  • We mistakenly named one of our section headers “TODOodo” instead of “TODO”, oops 🙈


Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Multiple Slack workspaces & AI message grouping

Image showing multiple slack workspaces

We now support connecting multiple Slack workspaces into your Plain workspace, with different ingestion settings for each Slack workspace.

If you have Slack Connect channels in your main Slack workspace but also maintain a separate Slack Community workspace, you can now track customer requests from both of them in Plain.

Moreover, we’ve added two new ways of ingesting Slack messages into Plain:

The AI mode automatically groups messages based on whether they belong together, leveraging an AI model to determine if they are part of the same conversation. When enabled, messages will be grouped into one thread, or split into different ones, depending on the message contents.

One-to-one mode always associates a Slack message on a channel and its thread to a single Plain thread.

This is in addition to our existing modes, Manual (e.g. by leaving a :ticket: emoji), and Automatic, which ingests all messages.


What's new

  • You can now automatically sync your Zendesk support requests and customers into Plain, so that your transition is smoother 😏

Bug fixes

  • We mistakenly named one of our section headers “TODOodo” instead of “TODO”, oops 🙈


Designed, built and written by

Preslav Mihaylov

Engineering

Note mentions

Image showing how note mentions work in Plain

This week we have released the ability to mention other Plain users in notes.

Users who are mentioned will receive a notification through their normal channel for personal notifications (email or Slack). These notifications are on by default but can be configured at Settings → Personal notifications.

What's new

  • You now get a notification when someone leaves a note on a thread which is assigned to you

  • You can now manually set and update the company for a customer

Improvements

  • Instead of showing a user ID for email notifications about Slack messages we now display the Slack user name

  • We have improved the design of Slack message timeline entries

Bug fixes

  • Addressed a bug in the customer card configuration UI that caused a validation error when attempting to use request headers

  • Resolved an issue causing emojis to appear in the incorrect order when searching in the emoji palette

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Note mentions

Image showing how note mentions work in Plain

This week we have released the ability to mention other Plain users in notes.

Users who are mentioned will receive a notification through their normal channel for personal notifications (email or Slack). These notifications are on by default but can be configured at Settings → Personal notifications.

What's new

  • You now get a notification when someone leaves a note on a thread which is assigned to you

  • You can now manually set and update the company for a customer

Improvements

  • Instead of showing a user ID for email notifications about Slack messages we now display the Slack user name

  • We have improved the design of Slack message timeline entries

Bug fixes

  • Addressed a bug in the customer card configuration UI that caused a validation error when attempting to use request headers

  • Resolved an issue causing emojis to appear in the incorrect order when searching in the emoji palette

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Note mentions

Image showing how note mentions work in Plain

This week we have released the ability to mention other Plain users in notes.

Users who are mentioned will receive a notification through their normal channel for personal notifications (email or Slack). These notifications are on by default but can be configured at Settings → Personal notifications.

What's new

  • You now get a notification when someone leaves a note on a thread which is assigned to you

  • You can now manually set and update the company for a customer

Improvements

  • Instead of showing a user ID for email notifications about Slack messages we now display the Slack user name

  • We have improved the design of Slack message timeline entries

Bug fixes

  • Addressed a bug in the customer card configuration UI that caused a validation error when attempting to use request headers

  • Resolved an issue causing emojis to appear in the incorrect order when searching in the emoji palette

Designed, built and written by

David Leyland

Engineering

Manual Slack message tracking

Image that shows a ticket emoji in Slack

Starting today, you can customize which Slack messages are ingested into Plain. You now have two ingestion modes: automatic (default) and manual (new).

When automatic ingestion is enabled, Plain automatically adds all messages in a Slack channel to Plain. Individual messages are intelligently grouped into a thread, and replies within a thread show up in the corresponding thread in Plain. This is the default behaviour.

When manual ingestion is enabled, you can choose which Slack messages to add to Plain. You can do this by reacting to them with an emoji of your choice, like 🎫. You can define this in Settings. Any threaded Slack messages will then be tracked automatically in Plain.

You can toggle the ingestion behavior under SettingsSlackSlack message ingestion settings.

Improvements

  • We have improved our email handling to automatically notify you when an email fails to send. This can happen due to circumstances outside our control, for example due to temporary issues with the recipient's email provider, a full inbox, or similar. A bounced email moves the thread back to ‘Todo’, so you can decide what to do with it.

  • You can now fork a Slack thread into two separate threads. This is available for top-level messages that have been grouped into a single thread in Plain.

  • You can now change the title of a thread with a simple click and edit.

  • We've fine-tuned our AI summarisation to generate better summaries and more accurately categorize threads.

  • If you search for a customer and can't find them, you can now create a customer manually via Plain to send them a new message.

  • Added notifications for notes on threads via email or Slack.

Bug fixes

  • Formatting and display improvements on Slack messages, including Slack mentions.

  • Autoresponders will no longer update the thread's preview text.

Designed, built and written by

Manual Slack message tracking

Image that shows a ticket emoji in Slack

Starting today, you can customize which Slack messages are ingested into Plain. You now have two ingestion modes: automatic (default) and manual (new).

When automatic ingestion is enabled, Plain automatically adds all messages in a Slack channel to Plain. Individual messages are intelligently grouped into a thread, and replies within a thread show up in the corresponding thread in Plain. This is the default behaviour.

When manual ingestion is enabled, you can choose which Slack messages to add to Plain. You can do this by reacting to them with an emoji of your choice, like 🎫. You can define this in Settings. Any threaded Slack messages will then be tracked automatically in Plain.

You can toggle the ingestion behavior under SettingsSlackSlack message ingestion settings.

Improvements

  • We have improved our email handling to automatically notify you when an email fails to send. This can happen due to circumstances outside our control, for example due to temporary issues with the recipient's email provider, a full inbox, or similar. A bounced email moves the thread back to ‘Todo’, so you can decide what to do with it.

  • You can now fork a Slack thread into two separate threads. This is available for top-level messages that have been grouped into a single thread in Plain.

  • You can now change the title of a thread with a simple click and edit.

  • We've fine-tuned our AI summarisation to generate better summaries and more accurately categorize threads.

  • If you search for a customer and can't find them, you can now create a customer manually via Plain to send them a new message.

  • Added notifications for notes on threads via email or Slack.

Bug fixes

  • Formatting and display improvements on Slack messages, including Slack mentions.

  • Autoresponders will no longer update the thread's preview text.

Designed, built and written by

Manual Slack message tracking

Image that shows a ticket emoji in Slack

Starting today, you can customize which Slack messages are ingested into Plain. You now have two ingestion modes: automatic (default) and manual (new).

When automatic ingestion is enabled, Plain automatically adds all messages in a Slack channel to Plain. Individual messages are intelligently grouped into a thread, and replies within a thread show up in the corresponding thread in Plain. This is the default behaviour.

When manual ingestion is enabled, you can choose which Slack messages to add to Plain. You can do this by reacting to them with an emoji of your choice, like 🎫. You can define this in Settings. Any threaded Slack messages will then be tracked automatically in Plain.

You can toggle the ingestion behavior under SettingsSlackSlack message ingestion settings.

Improvements

  • We have improved our email handling to automatically notify you when an email fails to send. This can happen due to circumstances outside our control, for example due to temporary issues with the recipient's email provider, a full inbox, or similar. A bounced email moves the thread back to ‘Todo’, so you can decide what to do with it.

  • You can now fork a Slack thread into two separate threads. This is available for top-level messages that have been grouped into a single thread in Plain.

  • You can now change the title of a thread with a simple click and edit.

  • We've fine-tuned our AI summarisation to generate better summaries and more accurately categorize threads.

  • If you search for a customer and can't find them, you can now create a customer manually via Plain to send them a new message.

  • Added notifications for notes on threads via email or Slack.

Bug fixes

  • Formatting and display improvements on Slack messages, including Slack mentions.

  • Autoresponders will no longer update the thread's preview text.

Designed, built and written by

Plain is now available in Slack

Plain and Slack logos next to each other

Our goal with Plain is to give you a single pane of glass across all your customer interactions, and to put those interactions into context – to show you the customer data you already have, help you coordinate all the work you do on behalf of customers with your product and engineering teams, and speed up your workflow.

Now, we’ve brought Plain to where most B2B companies talk to their customers: Slack. Our Slack integration automatically tracks customer messages for you in both private and public Slack Connect channels, consolidates them into a dedicated Slack channel of your choosing as well as the Plain app, and gives you an easy way to coordinate with your team.

This means you can now use the Plain app and API to talk to your customers wherever they are – all backed by our incredibly fast workflow, deep integrations into tools like Linear, powerful API, and integrated with your own data.

Our Slack integration is now available to both new and existing customers. Add as many channels as you like by heading to Settings > Slack in your Plain workspace, or by signing up here.

Below, we break down what makes our Slack integration special.

Rock-solid reliability

Trust is priceless. Our biggest priority in building our Slack integration was to make it extremely reliable.

🔄 Rock-solid, intelligent syncing. We’ve built Plain to sync every single message correctly, (nearly) without fail. Our success rate for message ingestion is currently at 99.94%. Multiple individual messages are automatically grouped into one thread – no more merging tickets.

❤️ Emojis speak louder than words. Sometimes a 👍🏼 says it all, and sometimes the moment calls for a custom :leslieknope: reaction. Slack reactions – including custom ones – are shown in Plain just like any other message, alongside any other formatting.

☕ Single stream of live notifications. Plain aggregates messages from all your customer channels into a single view. Our notifications are live-updating, so you’re never looking at old information on a previous notification. Sit back, relax, reply.

Write in Plain as you would in Slack

We want you to be able to write the way you always do, so we've invested in a first-class writing and reading experience within Plain.

🎨 Every formatting detail accounted for. Sometimes you say it in bold, sometimes with code, sometimes with attachments, sometimes with ❤️. Every message is full of important nuances and details. Formatting from Slack gets carried over to Plain and vice versa, so you’re never missing any meaning.

💬 Keep tabs without having to join channels. You can send a Slack message from Plain to every channel the bot is added to – regardless of whether you’re in it personally. Now you can both keep your support team in the loop and your Slack channels tidy.

🤖 Respond as yourself – or your doppelganger. Keep the conversation personal. Messages to channels that you’re already in are sent from your account; and messages to channels that you’re not in are sent by a friendly bot that looks just like you.

See your Slack conversations in context

By syncing customer messages from Slack to Plain, you gain all of Plain's powerful triage, prioritization and context features.

✨Auto-label and prioritize. Plain automatically triages, labels and summarizes incoming Slack messages so you can work through the most important questions first. Individual threads can be grouped by company, so you see all questions from the same customer in one place. You can also use customer groups to categorize threads based on your own business logic – for example, segmenting your Enterprise customers from your Free tier customers.

📊 Pull in customer data from your product. With customer cards, you can show information from your own systems while looking at a customer in Plain. This ensures that you always have important context at your fingertips, including billing and usage of your product.

🧠 Consolidate your channels into one place. Consolidate customer questions from Slack, email, and in-app forms so that you can fly through your support queue in one place.

Try it out now by heading to Settings > Slack in your Plain workspace, or by signing up here and using our docs to set up.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

Plain is now available in Slack

Plain and Slack logos next to each other

Our goal with Plain is to give you a single pane of glass across all your customer interactions, and to put those interactions into context – to show you the customer data you already have, help you coordinate all the work you do on behalf of customers with your product and engineering teams, and speed up your workflow.

Now, we’ve brought Plain to where most B2B companies talk to their customers: Slack. Our Slack integration automatically tracks customer messages for you in both private and public Slack Connect channels, consolidates them into a dedicated Slack channel of your choosing as well as the Plain app, and gives you an easy way to coordinate with your team.

This means you can now use the Plain app and API to talk to your customers wherever they are – all backed by our incredibly fast workflow, deep integrations into tools like Linear, powerful API, and integrated with your own data.

Our Slack integration is now available to both new and existing customers. Add as many channels as you like by heading to Settings > Slack in your Plain workspace, or by signing up here.

Below, we break down what makes our Slack integration special.

Rock-solid reliability

Trust is priceless. Our biggest priority in building our Slack integration was to make it extremely reliable.

🔄 Rock-solid, intelligent syncing. We’ve built Plain to sync every single message correctly, (nearly) without fail. Our success rate for message ingestion is currently at 99.94%. Multiple individual messages are automatically grouped into one thread – no more merging tickets.

❤️ Emojis speak louder than words. Sometimes a 👍🏼 says it all, and sometimes the moment calls for a custom :leslieknope: reaction. Slack reactions – including custom ones – are shown in Plain just like any other message, alongside any other formatting.

☕ Single stream of live notifications. Plain aggregates messages from all your customer channels into a single view. Our notifications are live-updating, so you’re never looking at old information on a previous notification. Sit back, relax, reply.

Write in Plain as you would in Slack

We want you to be able to write the way you always do, so we've invested in a first-class writing and reading experience within Plain.

🎨 Every formatting detail accounted for. Sometimes you say it in bold, sometimes with code, sometimes with attachments, sometimes with ❤️. Every message is full of important nuances and details. Formatting from Slack gets carried over to Plain and vice versa, so you’re never missing any meaning.

💬 Keep tabs without having to join channels. You can send a Slack message from Plain to every channel the bot is added to – regardless of whether you’re in it personally. Now you can both keep your support team in the loop and your Slack channels tidy.

🤖 Respond as yourself – or your doppelganger. Keep the conversation personal. Messages to channels that you’re already in are sent from your account; and messages to channels that you’re not in are sent by a friendly bot that looks just like you.

See your Slack conversations in context

By syncing customer messages from Slack to Plain, you gain all of Plain's powerful triage, prioritization and context features.

✨Auto-label and prioritize. Plain automatically triages, labels and summarizes incoming Slack messages so you can work through the most important questions first. Individual threads can be grouped by company, so you see all questions from the same customer in one place. You can also use customer groups to categorize threads based on your own business logic – for example, segmenting your Enterprise customers from your Free tier customers.

📊 Pull in customer data from your product. With customer cards, you can show information from your own systems while looking at a customer in Plain. This ensures that you always have important context at your fingertips, including billing and usage of your product.

🧠 Consolidate your channels into one place. Consolidate customer questions from Slack, email, and in-app forms so that you can fly through your support queue in one place.

Try it out now by heading to Settings > Slack in your Plain workspace, or by signing up here and using our docs to set up.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

Plain is now available in Slack

Plain and Slack logos next to each other

Our goal with Plain is to give you a single pane of glass across all your customer interactions, and to put those interactions into context – to show you the customer data you already have, help you coordinate all the work you do on behalf of customers with your product and engineering teams, and speed up your workflow.

Now, we’ve brought Plain to where most B2B companies talk to their customers: Slack. Our Slack integration automatically tracks customer messages for you in both private and public Slack Connect channels, consolidates them into a dedicated Slack channel of your choosing as well as the Plain app, and gives you an easy way to coordinate with your team.

This means you can now use the Plain app and API to talk to your customers wherever they are – all backed by our incredibly fast workflow, deep integrations into tools like Linear, powerful API, and integrated with your own data.

Our Slack integration is now available to both new and existing customers. Add as many channels as you like by heading to Settings > Slack in your Plain workspace, or by signing up here.

Below, we break down what makes our Slack integration special.

Rock-solid reliability

Trust is priceless. Our biggest priority in building our Slack integration was to make it extremely reliable.

🔄 Rock-solid, intelligent syncing. We’ve built Plain to sync every single message correctly, (nearly) without fail. Our success rate for message ingestion is currently at 99.94%. Multiple individual messages are automatically grouped into one thread – no more merging tickets.

❤️ Emojis speak louder than words. Sometimes a 👍🏼 says it all, and sometimes the moment calls for a custom :leslieknope: reaction. Slack reactions – including custom ones – are shown in Plain just like any other message, alongside any other formatting.

☕ Single stream of live notifications. Plain aggregates messages from all your customer channels into a single view. Our notifications are live-updating, so you’re never looking at old information on a previous notification. Sit back, relax, reply.

Write in Plain as you would in Slack

We want you to be able to write the way you always do, so we've invested in a first-class writing and reading experience within Plain.

🎨 Every formatting detail accounted for. Sometimes you say it in bold, sometimes with code, sometimes with attachments, sometimes with ❤️. Every message is full of important nuances and details. Formatting from Slack gets carried over to Plain and vice versa, so you’re never missing any meaning.

💬 Keep tabs without having to join channels. You can send a Slack message from Plain to every channel the bot is added to – regardless of whether you’re in it personally. Now you can both keep your support team in the loop and your Slack channels tidy.

🤖 Respond as yourself – or your doppelganger. Keep the conversation personal. Messages to channels that you’re already in are sent from your account; and messages to channels that you’re not in are sent by a friendly bot that looks just like you.

See your Slack conversations in context

By syncing customer messages from Slack to Plain, you gain all of Plain's powerful triage, prioritization and context features.

✨Auto-label and prioritize. Plain automatically triages, labels and summarizes incoming Slack messages so you can work through the most important questions first. Individual threads can be grouped by company, so you see all questions from the same customer in one place. You can also use customer groups to categorize threads based on your own business logic – for example, segmenting your Enterprise customers from your Free tier customers.

📊 Pull in customer data from your product. With customer cards, you can show information from your own systems while looking at a customer in Plain. This ensures that you always have important context at your fingertips, including billing and usage of your product.

🧠 Consolidate your channels into one place. Consolidate customer questions from Slack, email, and in-app forms so that you can fly through your support queue in one place.

Try it out now by heading to Settings > Slack in your Plain workspace, or by signing up here and using our docs to set up.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

New context menu and snippet improvements

New menu in Plain

This week we’ve released some improvements aimed at optimizing your workflow in Plain and making it even more efficient.

Right-click context menu

When you right-click on a thread in a queue, a context menu will appear. This menu gives you multiple quick actions to scan and triage your support workflow, without having to click into the individual thread. You can assign or un-assign a user, snooze a thread, or modify labels, customer groups, and priorities.

Snippet improvements

We’ve also made it easier to manage snippets. You can now create or modify snippets directly from the composer, without needing to navigate to Settings.

When you highlight text in the composer and click the snippet button, a snippet panel will appear with the selected text and you can quickly save a new snippet.

You can also create new snippets or edit existing ones from the snippet palette with either the [ key or the snippet button.

Lastly, we’ve added search to the snippet Settings page so you can quickly scan your snippet repository to find the right one.

Improvements

  • After a contact form is submitted, your response to a user is sent via email. We now copy the original question into the email so the customer has full context on the interaction.

  • The reason badge (reason a thread is back in your ‘To Do’ queue) now appears on the thread queue.

  • We’ve updated the visual style of focus rings.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed visual bug in dark mode on our skeleton loading states.

  • Fixed a bug where emoticons didn’t show up when searching in the emoji palette.

  • Fixed a bug where pressing the e key in the label input field on the Linear issue panel caused the ‘Mark as Done’ shortcut to fire.

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

New context menu and snippet improvements

New menu in Plain

This week we’ve released some improvements aimed at optimizing your workflow in Plain and making it even more efficient.

Right-click context menu

When you right-click on a thread in a queue, a context menu will appear. This menu gives you multiple quick actions to scan and triage your support workflow, without having to click into the individual thread. You can assign or un-assign a user, snooze a thread, or modify labels, customer groups, and priorities.

Snippet improvements

We’ve also made it easier to manage snippets. You can now create or modify snippets directly from the composer, without needing to navigate to Settings.

When you highlight text in the composer and click the snippet button, a snippet panel will appear with the selected text and you can quickly save a new snippet.

You can also create new snippets or edit existing ones from the snippet palette with either the [ key or the snippet button.

Lastly, we’ve added search to the snippet Settings page so you can quickly scan your snippet repository to find the right one.

Improvements

  • After a contact form is submitted, your response to a user is sent via email. We now copy the original question into the email so the customer has full context on the interaction.

  • The reason badge (reason a thread is back in your ‘To Do’ queue) now appears on the thread queue.

  • We’ve updated the visual style of focus rings.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed visual bug in dark mode on our skeleton loading states.

  • Fixed a bug where emoticons didn’t show up when searching in the emoji palette.

  • Fixed a bug where pressing the e key in the label input field on the Linear issue panel caused the ‘Mark as Done’ shortcut to fire.

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

New context menu and snippet improvements

New menu in Plain

This week we’ve released some improvements aimed at optimizing your workflow in Plain and making it even more efficient.

Right-click context menu

When you right-click on a thread in a queue, a context menu will appear. This menu gives you multiple quick actions to scan and triage your support workflow, without having to click into the individual thread. You can assign or un-assign a user, snooze a thread, or modify labels, customer groups, and priorities.

Snippet improvements

We’ve also made it easier to manage snippets. You can now create or modify snippets directly from the composer, without needing to navigate to Settings.

When you highlight text in the composer and click the snippet button, a snippet panel will appear with the selected text and you can quickly save a new snippet.

You can also create new snippets or edit existing ones from the snippet palette with either the [ key or the snippet button.

Lastly, we’ve added search to the snippet Settings page so you can quickly scan your snippet repository to find the right one.

Improvements

  • After a contact form is submitted, your response to a user is sent via email. We now copy the original question into the email so the customer has full context on the interaction.

  • The reason badge (reason a thread is back in your ‘To Do’ queue) now appears on the thread queue.

  • We’ve updated the visual style of focus rings.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed visual bug in dark mode on our skeleton loading states.

  • Fixed a bug where emoticons didn’t show up when searching in the emoji palette.

  • Fixed a bug where pressing the e key in the label input field on the Linear issue panel caused the ‘Mark as Done’ shortcut to fire.

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Out of office

Out of office toggle in Plain

Few features are better suited to a final changelog before the holidays than this latest release. You can now set an auto-reply message in Plain.

Enabling the auto-reply feature will send a message of your choosing to any newly created threads. Use it to let your customers know what to expect during the holiday period, to manage expectations whenever you're experiencing high volume, or just to let customers know you've got their message.

The message can be configured by Admins only, and will only get sent once to the very first message in a thread. Try it out now in Settings → Auto-reply.

Thank you for following us along on our changelog, and for using Plain. Happy holidays and see you in 2024!

What's new

  • Plain now supports emojis in the composer 🎉. You can now access them by either typing : or hitting the 😃 icon in the composer bar.


Improvements

  • Linear: When creating a Linear issue, we now default to the last team you used

  • Linear: When creating a Linear issue, you can now set the status of the issue (e.g. Todo)

  • Workflow: When you Snooze a thread and pick a duration, this is now saved for next time, allowing you to do a one-click snooze

  • Workflow: When you mark a customer as spam, you are now automatically moved on to the next customer

  • Workflow: You can now customise the mark as done shortcut to change it to be cmd + e (if you find e too error prone)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug where pressing Back from a thread you'd found through search would not redirect you to back to the search results

  • Fixed a bug where the View more button on en email would sometimes not show any more content

  • When you mark a customer as helped from the queue, we now play the "Mark as helped" sound. If you haven't tried it yet, find it in Settings. 🎵

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Out of office

Out of office toggle in Plain

Few features are better suited to a final changelog before the holidays than this latest release. You can now set an auto-reply message in Plain.

Enabling the auto-reply feature will send a message of your choosing to any newly created threads. Use it to let your customers know what to expect during the holiday period, to manage expectations whenever you're experiencing high volume, or just to let customers know you've got their message.

The message can be configured by Admins only, and will only get sent once to the very first message in a thread. Try it out now in Settings → Auto-reply.

Thank you for following us along on our changelog, and for using Plain. Happy holidays and see you in 2024!

What's new

  • Plain now supports emojis in the composer 🎉. You can now access them by either typing : or hitting the 😃 icon in the composer bar.


Improvements

  • Linear: When creating a Linear issue, we now default to the last team you used

  • Linear: When creating a Linear issue, you can now set the status of the issue (e.g. Todo)

  • Workflow: When you Snooze a thread and pick a duration, this is now saved for next time, allowing you to do a one-click snooze

  • Workflow: When you mark a customer as spam, you are now automatically moved on to the next customer

  • Workflow: You can now customise the mark as done shortcut to change it to be cmd + e (if you find e too error prone)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug where pressing Back from a thread you'd found through search would not redirect you to back to the search results

  • Fixed a bug where the View more button on en email would sometimes not show any more content

  • When you mark a customer as helped from the queue, we now play the "Mark as helped" sound. If you haven't tried it yet, find it in Settings. 🎵

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Out of office

Out of office toggle in Plain

Few features are better suited to a final changelog before the holidays than this latest release. You can now set an auto-reply message in Plain.

Enabling the auto-reply feature will send a message of your choosing to any newly created threads. Use it to let your customers know what to expect during the holiday period, to manage expectations whenever you're experiencing high volume, or just to let customers know you've got their message.

The message can be configured by Admins only, and will only get sent once to the very first message in a thread. Try it out now in Settings → Auto-reply.

Thank you for following us along on our changelog, and for using Plain. Happy holidays and see you in 2024!

What's new

  • Plain now supports emojis in the composer 🎉. You can now access them by either typing : or hitting the 😃 icon in the composer bar.


Improvements

  • Linear: When creating a Linear issue, we now default to the last team you used

  • Linear: When creating a Linear issue, you can now set the status of the issue (e.g. Todo)

  • Workflow: When you Snooze a thread and pick a duration, this is now saved for next time, allowing you to do a one-click snooze

  • Workflow: When you mark a customer as spam, you are now automatically moved on to the next customer

  • Workflow: You can now customise the mark as done shortcut to change it to be cmd + e (if you find e too error prone)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug where pressing Back from a thread you'd found through search would not redirect you to back to the search results

  • Fixed a bug where the View more button on en email would sometimes not show any more content

  • When you mark a customer as helped from the queue, we now play the "Mark as helped" sound. If you haven't tried it yet, find it in Settings. 🎵

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Jordan Drake

Engineering

AI Labels & Summaries

AI labels in Plain

This week, we’re releasing our first of many AI features in Plain, with automatic labeling and summarization of threads. Your support queue is now much richer and you can more easily prioritize and triage support requests.

Plain AI will add 1-2 labels automatically to a thread based on its content. To best leverage Plain AI, make sure you’ve already set up labels (Settings → Labels).

As a thread grows over time, a summary of the thread will be added and kept up-to-date so you know what has happened without having to read the full timeline and every message. You can see the summary on the top right of any thread and in Slack notifications.

How AI labels work in PLain

To turn on AI features, go to Settings → Workflow. This is an opt-in feature and is included for free for all Plain customers.

What's new

  • You can now search from ⌘ + K.

  • You can use up and down arrow keys to navigate through the thread list.

Improvements

  • New documentation for alternate emails and improved quickstart guide.

  • The thread "reason" tags now work so that you always get an updated tag showing you why the thread is in its current status. We also improved how these reason tags look.

  • Front-end performance improvements: no more styled-components here!

  • Added a billing page so you can see your invoices and payments in Settings.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug which meant that ESC wouldn't consistently take you back from a thread.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

AI Labels & Summaries

AI labels in Plain

This week, we’re releasing our first of many AI features in Plain, with automatic labeling and summarization of threads. Your support queue is now much richer and you can more easily prioritize and triage support requests.

Plain AI will add 1-2 labels automatically to a thread based on its content. To best leverage Plain AI, make sure you’ve already set up labels (Settings → Labels).

As a thread grows over time, a summary of the thread will be added and kept up-to-date so you know what has happened without having to read the full timeline and every message. You can see the summary on the top right of any thread and in Slack notifications.

How AI labels work in PLain

To turn on AI features, go to Settings → Workflow. This is an opt-in feature and is included for free for all Plain customers.

What's new

  • You can now search from ⌘ + K.

  • You can use up and down arrow keys to navigate through the thread list.

Improvements

  • New documentation for alternate emails and improved quickstart guide.

  • The thread "reason" tags now work so that you always get an updated tag showing you why the thread is in its current status. We also improved how these reason tags look.

  • Front-end performance improvements: no more styled-components here!

  • Added a billing page so you can see your invoices and payments in Settings.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug which meant that ESC wouldn't consistently take you back from a thread.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

AI Labels & Summaries

AI labels in Plain

This week, we’re releasing our first of many AI features in Plain, with automatic labeling and summarization of threads. Your support queue is now much richer and you can more easily prioritize and triage support requests.

Plain AI will add 1-2 labels automatically to a thread based on its content. To best leverage Plain AI, make sure you’ve already set up labels (Settings → Labels).

As a thread grows over time, a summary of the thread will be added and kept up-to-date so you know what has happened without having to read the full timeline and every message. You can see the summary on the top right of any thread and in Slack notifications.

How AI labels work in PLain

To turn on AI features, go to Settings → Workflow. This is an opt-in feature and is included for free for all Plain customers.

What's new

  • You can now search from ⌘ + K.

  • You can use up and down arrow keys to navigate through the thread list.

Improvements

  • New documentation for alternate emails and improved quickstart guide.

  • The thread "reason" tags now work so that you always get an updated tag showing you why the thread is in its current status. We also improved how these reason tags look.

  • Front-end performance improvements: no more styled-components here!

  • Added a billing page so you can see your invoices and payments in Settings.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug which meant that ESC wouldn't consistently take you back from a thread.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Company support

Image showing how companies are shown in Plain

This week we’re launching company support which allows you to see the company a customer belongs to, so you have more context when providing support in Plain.

The company is automatically set based on the email domain of the customer and is visible throughout Plain.

You can also see all of your open threads by company in the left hand sidebar and filter by company in any queue using the shortcut F or the top right filter button.

Improvements

  • Fixed the truncation and wrapping of the thread description and customer details

  • Up to 10 alternate emails are allowed now (previously 5)

  • Changed the order of the insights to better surface most used reports

  • Various visual fixes to focus states

  • Thread “reason tags” (e.g. “New Reply”, “Linear update” etc.) now update on every new event meaning you always know of the latest activity on a thread.

  • Visual improvements to the workflow settings page

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Company support

Image showing how companies are shown in Plain

This week we’re launching company support which allows you to see the company a customer belongs to, so you have more context when providing support in Plain.

The company is automatically set based on the email domain of the customer and is visible throughout Plain.

You can also see all of your open threads by company in the left hand sidebar and filter by company in any queue using the shortcut F or the top right filter button.

Improvements

  • Fixed the truncation and wrapping of the thread description and customer details

  • Up to 10 alternate emails are allowed now (previously 5)

  • Changed the order of the insights to better surface most used reports

  • Various visual fixes to focus states

  • Thread “reason tags” (e.g. “New Reply”, “Linear update” etc.) now update on every new event meaning you always know of the latest activity on a thread.

  • Visual improvements to the workflow settings page

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Company support

Image showing how companies are shown in Plain

This week we’re launching company support which allows you to see the company a customer belongs to, so you have more context when providing support in Plain.

The company is automatically set based on the email domain of the customer and is visible throughout Plain.

You can also see all of your open threads by company in the left hand sidebar and filter by company in any queue using the shortcut F or the top right filter button.

Improvements

  • Fixed the truncation and wrapping of the thread description and customer details

  • Up to 10 alternate emails are allowed now (previously 5)

  • Changed the order of the insights to better surface most used reports

  • Various visual fixes to focus states

  • Thread “reason tags” (e.g. “New Reply”, “Linear update” etc.) now update on every new event meaning you always know of the latest activity on a thread.

  • Visual improvements to the workflow settings page

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

New documentation

This week we released our new documentation. This gives you a much better view of Plain’s data model, key features and everything you need to get the most out of Plain.

As part of this we’ve also separated technical API documentation to make it easier to address different use-cases, no matter how advanced.

Thank you to the fantastic team at Mintlify for making it so easy to pull together these docs and migrate across!

Go to docs

Improvements

  • API: Improved validation when upserting customers and specifying customer groups.

  • API: The max snooze duration of a thread is now 60 days

  • When you mark a thread as done and there is no ‘next’ thread you are now:

    • Taken to the previous thread if there is one

    • Taken back to the queue you came from when you hit inbox zeroVarious small visual tweaks to dark-mode.

  • Various small visual tweaks to dark-mode.


Designed, built and written by

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

New documentation

This week we released our new documentation. This gives you a much better view of Plain’s data model, key features and everything you need to get the most out of Plain.

As part of this we’ve also separated technical API documentation to make it easier to address different use-cases, no matter how advanced.

Thank you to the fantastic team at Mintlify for making it so easy to pull together these docs and migrate across!

Go to docs

Improvements

  • API: Improved validation when upserting customers and specifying customer groups.

  • API: The max snooze duration of a thread is now 60 days

  • When you mark a thread as done and there is no ‘next’ thread you are now:

    • Taken to the previous thread if there is one

    • Taken back to the queue you came from when you hit inbox zeroVarious small visual tweaks to dark-mode.

  • Various small visual tweaks to dark-mode.


Designed, built and written by

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

New documentation

This week we released our new documentation. This gives you a much better view of Plain’s data model, key features and everything you need to get the most out of Plain.

As part of this we’ve also separated technical API documentation to make it easier to address different use-cases, no matter how advanced.

Thank you to the fantastic team at Mintlify for making it so easy to pull together these docs and migrate across!

Go to docs

Improvements

  • API: Improved validation when upserting customers and specifying customer groups.

  • API: The max snooze duration of a thread is now 60 days

  • When you mark a thread as done and there is no ‘next’ thread you are now:

    • Taken to the previous thread if there is one

    • Taken back to the queue you came from when you hit inbox zeroVarious small visual tweaks to dark-mode.

  • Various small visual tweaks to dark-mode.


Designed, built and written by

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Improved Linear integration

Image showing Plain's logo side-by-side with Linear

Our Linear integration just got even better. Just over 6 months ago, we launched the first version of our native Linear integration. It’s quickly become one of our most popular features and with this release, we’re making it even more powerful to help you bring support and engineering together.

We’ve made working with Linear issues even faster, removing several steps and clicks from the process, and making Linear issues even more central to the workflow in Plain. Linear issues are now the primary way to keep track of issues within Plain and can be linked to any customer conversation with a single click.

In detail:

  • Linking a thread in Plain directly to a Linear issue is just a click away. Simply hit I to link an existing Linear issue, or create a new one right from within Plain.

  • When a Linear issue is marked as Done, any linked threads will automatically pop back into your Todo list, so you can keep your customers informed. They’ll also be highlighted for you in the queue.

  • You can now also see all Linear issues on a thread directly on the queue.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

Improved Linear integration

Image showing Plain's logo side-by-side with Linear

Our Linear integration just got even better. Just over 6 months ago, we launched the first version of our native Linear integration. It’s quickly become one of our most popular features and with this release, we’re making it even more powerful to help you bring support and engineering together.

We’ve made working with Linear issues even faster, removing several steps and clicks from the process, and making Linear issues even more central to the workflow in Plain. Linear issues are now the primary way to keep track of issues within Plain and can be linked to any customer conversation with a single click.

In detail:

  • Linking a thread in Plain directly to a Linear issue is just a click away. Simply hit I to link an existing Linear issue, or create a new one right from within Plain.

  • When a Linear issue is marked as Done, any linked threads will automatically pop back into your Todo list, so you can keep your customers informed. They’ll also be highlighted for you in the queue.

  • You can now also see all Linear issues on a thread directly on the queue.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

Improved Linear integration

Image showing Plain's logo side-by-side with Linear

Our Linear integration just got even better. Just over 6 months ago, we launched the first version of our native Linear integration. It’s quickly become one of our most popular features and with this release, we’re making it even more powerful to help you bring support and engineering together.

We’ve made working with Linear issues even faster, removing several steps and clicks from the process, and making Linear issues even more central to the workflow in Plain. Linear issues are now the primary way to keep track of issues within Plain and can be linked to any customer conversation with a single click.

In detail:

  • Linking a thread in Plain directly to a Linear issue is just a click away. Simply hit I to link an existing Linear issue, or create a new one right from within Plain.

  • When a Linear issue is marked as Done, any linked threads will automatically pop back into your Todo list, so you can keep your customers informed. They’ll also be highlighted for you in the queue.

  • You can now also see all Linear issues on a thread directly on the queue.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

Redesigned interface

Image showing new UI in Plain

On top of a new workflow announced in the previous changelog, we’ve also completely rebuilt our app for an even faster support experience. It’s now easier to navigate and browse customer conversations, we added new keyboard shortcuts for just about anything you'd want to do, and we also improved the writing experience.

The changes in more detail:

  • Redesigned sidebar with more granular queues: Queues are now structured into All threads, Your threads, or Unassigned threads. Move faster with Labels, Customer Groups and Email Addresses now directly accessible.

  • Better UI for filters: Sort your data the way you want with options like message recency and status changes.

  • Shortcuts for everything: We've added some handy shortcuts to speed things up. Label items with l, hide sidebars with cmd + . and cmd + / for a focused timeline, reply faster with r and streamline your messaging with cmd shift + enter. You can see the full list of keyboard shortcuts by going to Support → Keyboard Shortcuts in the bottom left, or hitting ?.

  • Cmd+K: We’ve added lots of new actions to make moving around Plain even faster.

  • Improved writing experience: The composer now folds away when not in use. Add notes anytime with N. Formatting controls are now always visible.

  • Simplified timeline: We've given the timeline a makeover, making it easier to see changes in priority and label assignments.

  • Updated support contact form: Yes, we've even updated our own form (lol).

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

Redesigned interface

Image showing new UI in Plain

On top of a new workflow announced in the previous changelog, we’ve also completely rebuilt our app for an even faster support experience. It’s now easier to navigate and browse customer conversations, we added new keyboard shortcuts for just about anything you'd want to do, and we also improved the writing experience.

The changes in more detail:

  • Redesigned sidebar with more granular queues: Queues are now structured into All threads, Your threads, or Unassigned threads. Move faster with Labels, Customer Groups and Email Addresses now directly accessible.

  • Better UI for filters: Sort your data the way you want with options like message recency and status changes.

  • Shortcuts for everything: We've added some handy shortcuts to speed things up. Label items with l, hide sidebars with cmd + . and cmd + / for a focused timeline, reply faster with r and streamline your messaging with cmd shift + enter. You can see the full list of keyboard shortcuts by going to Support → Keyboard Shortcuts in the bottom left, or hitting ?.

  • Cmd+K: We’ve added lots of new actions to make moving around Plain even faster.

  • Improved writing experience: The composer now folds away when not in use. Add notes anytime with N. Formatting controls are now always visible.

  • Simplified timeline: We've given the timeline a makeover, making it easier to see changes in priority and label assignments.

  • Updated support contact form: Yes, we've even updated our own form (lol).

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

Redesigned interface

Image showing new UI in Plain

On top of a new workflow announced in the previous changelog, we’ve also completely rebuilt our app for an even faster support experience. It’s now easier to navigate and browse customer conversations, we added new keyboard shortcuts for just about anything you'd want to do, and we also improved the writing experience.

The changes in more detail:

  • Redesigned sidebar with more granular queues: Queues are now structured into All threads, Your threads, or Unassigned threads. Move faster with Labels, Customer Groups and Email Addresses now directly accessible.

  • Better UI for filters: Sort your data the way you want with options like message recency and status changes.

  • Shortcuts for everything: We've added some handy shortcuts to speed things up. Label items with l, hide sidebars with cmd + . and cmd + / for a focused timeline, reply faster with r and streamline your messaging with cmd shift + enter. You can see the full list of keyboard shortcuts by going to Support → Keyboard Shortcuts in the bottom left, or hitting ?.

  • Cmd+K: We’ve added lots of new actions to make moving around Plain even faster.

  • Improved writing experience: The composer now folds away when not in use. Add notes anytime with N. Formatting controls are now always visible.

  • Simplified timeline: We've given the timeline a makeover, making it easier to see changes in priority and label assignments.

  • Updated support contact form: Yes, we've even updated our own form (lol).

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

Composer Improvements

Image showing Plain's new composer

We’ve made lots of updates to make the writing experience in Plain much more polished. The composer now includes an action bar with keyboard shortcuts so that you can fly through customers even faster.

We’ve also made a few other changes to the composer, including:

  • The editor collapses when empty or not in focus, providing more space for the timeline.

  • Snippets have been updated, so that you can now select and filter inline in the editor, e.g. [hello will automatically search for any snippets with hello in it.

  • To switch between starting a new email and replying to the last email, you can click on the bottom left button of the composer.

  • To switch to notes instead, you can click the Note button below the composer or use the shortcut n to quickly toggle to Note and back.

Combined, these make for some nice quality of life improvements to the Plain experience and we’re really excited for you to try it.

What's new

  • Introduced email signatures. You can find these under Settings, which will be appended to all emails sent from Plain.

  • Added the ability to filter your queues in Plain by email address if you have multiple email addresses set up (for example, support@ and sales@).

Improvements

  • Further improved keyword search, so now Plain searches not just in names and emails, but all message content.

  • Shipped an initial version of ’View Original Email’ to give you a view on a full HTML email, now accessible via the three dots on the top right of any email in a timeline.

  • If you choose a different sorting for the queue, it now persists when you change queues.

  • Instead of automatically going to the next customer, you can now click the “Go to next customer” button on the action bar below the editor (or use the shortcut J) to go to the next customer in the queue.

  • If your customer is no longer part of a queue, we remember where the customer was and navigate to the relative place in the queue when you use J / K shortcuts.

  • An empty state now shows instead of a loading state on the search page before a search term is entered.

Bug fixes

  • We’ve fixed a bug in Safari where navigating to pages was not always working.

  • We’ve fixed a bug that happened when logging users in and out on the same workspace on the same machine and browser.

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Composer Improvements

Image showing Plain's new composer

We’ve made lots of updates to make the writing experience in Plain much more polished. The composer now includes an action bar with keyboard shortcuts so that you can fly through customers even faster.

We’ve also made a few other changes to the composer, including:

  • The editor collapses when empty or not in focus, providing more space for the timeline.

  • Snippets have been updated, so that you can now select and filter inline in the editor, e.g. [hello will automatically search for any snippets with hello in it.

  • To switch between starting a new email and replying to the last email, you can click on the bottom left button of the composer.

  • To switch to notes instead, you can click the Note button below the composer or use the shortcut n to quickly toggle to Note and back.

Combined, these make for some nice quality of life improvements to the Plain experience and we’re really excited for you to try it.

What's new

  • Introduced email signatures. You can find these under Settings, which will be appended to all emails sent from Plain.

  • Added the ability to filter your queues in Plain by email address if you have multiple email addresses set up (for example, support@ and sales@).

Improvements

  • Further improved keyword search, so now Plain searches not just in names and emails, but all message content.

  • Shipped an initial version of ’View Original Email’ to give you a view on a full HTML email, now accessible via the three dots on the top right of any email in a timeline.

  • If you choose a different sorting for the queue, it now persists when you change queues.

  • Instead of automatically going to the next customer, you can now click the “Go to next customer” button on the action bar below the editor (or use the shortcut J) to go to the next customer in the queue.

  • If your customer is no longer part of a queue, we remember where the customer was and navigate to the relative place in the queue when you use J / K shortcuts.

  • An empty state now shows instead of a loading state on the search page before a search term is entered.

Bug fixes

  • We’ve fixed a bug in Safari where navigating to pages was not always working.

  • We’ve fixed a bug that happened when logging users in and out on the same workspace on the same machine and browser.

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Composer Improvements

Image showing Plain's new composer

We’ve made lots of updates to make the writing experience in Plain much more polished. The composer now includes an action bar with keyboard shortcuts so that you can fly through customers even faster.

We’ve also made a few other changes to the composer, including:

  • The editor collapses when empty or not in focus, providing more space for the timeline.

  • Snippets have been updated, so that you can now select and filter inline in the editor, e.g. [hello will automatically search for any snippets with hello in it.

  • To switch between starting a new email and replying to the last email, you can click on the bottom left button of the composer.

  • To switch to notes instead, you can click the Note button below the composer or use the shortcut n to quickly toggle to Note and back.

Combined, these make for some nice quality of life improvements to the Plain experience and we’re really excited for you to try it.

What's new

  • Introduced email signatures. You can find these under Settings, which will be appended to all emails sent from Plain.

  • Added the ability to filter your queues in Plain by email address if you have multiple email addresses set up (for example, support@ and sales@).

Improvements

  • Further improved keyword search, so now Plain searches not just in names and emails, but all message content.

  • Shipped an initial version of ’View Original Email’ to give you a view on a full HTML email, now accessible via the three dots on the top right of any email in a timeline.

  • If you choose a different sorting for the queue, it now persists when you change queues.

  • Instead of automatically going to the next customer, you can now click the “Go to next customer” button on the action bar below the editor (or use the shortcut J) to go to the next customer in the queue.

  • If your customer is no longer part of a queue, we remember where the customer was and navigate to the relative place in the queue when you use J / K shortcuts.

  • An empty state now shows instead of a loading state on the search page before a search term is entered.

Bug fixes

  • We’ve fixed a bug in Safari where navigating to pages was not always working.

  • We’ve fixed a bug that happened when logging users in and out on the same workspace on the same machine and browser.

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Multiple emails

Image showing multiple emails added to Plain

We’ve just introduced the ability to add multiple support email addresses for a single workspace. This was a highly requested feature, so we’re excited to share this with you.

Previously, when you set up Plain you were able to provide a single support email address (e.g. help@plain.com) as described here. This was the only email address that customers could email, and the only email address for outgoing emails from Plain.

From today onwards, you can add up to 5 alternate email addresses (e.g. security@plain.com or sales@plain.com), allowing you to both send and receive emails from all of these.

When typing your reply to an email, Plain defaults to the email address that you received the message from – so if you received an email to the jobs@ inbox, we’ll send the response from there.

You can add additional email addresses now in Settings → Emails.

Improvements

  • When marking a customer as spam, you now have the option to quickly undo if it was a mistake.

  • Customers previously marked as spam can now be accessed from the customer list.

  • When searching for a snippet, you can now hit enter to immediately select the first matching item.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Multiple emails

Image showing multiple emails added to Plain

We’ve just introduced the ability to add multiple support email addresses for a single workspace. This was a highly requested feature, so we’re excited to share this with you.

Previously, when you set up Plain you were able to provide a single support email address (e.g. help@plain.com) as described here. This was the only email address that customers could email, and the only email address for outgoing emails from Plain.

From today onwards, you can add up to 5 alternate email addresses (e.g. security@plain.com or sales@plain.com), allowing you to both send and receive emails from all of these.

When typing your reply to an email, Plain defaults to the email address that you received the message from – so if you received an email to the jobs@ inbox, we’ll send the response from there.

You can add additional email addresses now in Settings → Emails.

Improvements

  • When marking a customer as spam, you now have the option to quickly undo if it was a mistake.

  • Customers previously marked as spam can now be accessed from the customer list.

  • When searching for a snippet, you can now hit enter to immediately select the first matching item.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Multiple emails

Image showing multiple emails added to Plain

We’ve just introduced the ability to add multiple support email addresses for a single workspace. This was a highly requested feature, so we’re excited to share this with you.

Previously, when you set up Plain you were able to provide a single support email address (e.g. help@plain.com) as described here. This was the only email address that customers could email, and the only email address for outgoing emails from Plain.

From today onwards, you can add up to 5 alternate email addresses (e.g. security@plain.com or sales@plain.com), allowing you to both send and receive emails from all of these.

When typing your reply to an email, Plain defaults to the email address that you received the message from – so if you received an email to the jobs@ inbox, we’ll send the response from there.

You can add additional email addresses now in Settings → Emails.

Improvements

  • When marking a customer as spam, you now have the option to quickly undo if it was a mistake.

  • Customers previously marked as spam can now be accessed from the customer list.

  • When searching for a snippet, you can now hit enter to immediately select the first matching item.

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Code Blocks

Image showing codeblocks in Plain


What's new

You can now use inline code and code blocks with syntax highlighting when sending emails from Plain. Code blocks will automatically detect language, but you can also set it explicitly with ```<language>.

Now you can also use Bold, italic, lists or block quotes as formatting options. To use them, simply select the text or type standard Markdown syntax. These same formatting options are also supported in snippets. Behind the scenes, we’ve completely rebuilt the composer from the ground up (with some help from Tip Tap) so it’ll feel a lot faster, smoother and more performant.

We’re also excited to officially introduce support for snippet variables, which were an undocumented feature until now. Create new snippets by navigating to Settings > Snippets. Then, simply copy and paste the snippet variable into the "Snippet Content" field within your message and the snippet will be replaced with the corresponding customer data.

Here are some supported variables:

For customer-specific details:

  • {{ customer.email }}: This snippet will automatically fill in the customer's email address.

  • {{ customer.fullName }}: Use this snippet to insert the full name of the customer you're communicating with.

  • {{ customer.shortName }}: Insert this snippet to include the customer's abbreviated or shortened name.

For user-specific details:

  • {{ user.publicName }}: This snippet will populate your own public name within the message.

Note: If the corresponding information is missing from the customer's profile, the snippet variable will be replaced by an empty value. This means that no content will be displayed in place of the snippet variable.

Improvements

  • You can now shift + click to batch select customers in a queue for any bulk action

  • You can now send a message and mark a customer as helped at the same time by using the shortcut ⌘ Command + ⌥ Option + Enter

  • When marking a customer as spam, you now automatically go to the next customer

  • If a customer only has a custom timeline entry in the timeline, the subject in the composer is automatically set to the CTE’s title (if available)

  • When creating a new Linear issue, the title will now be auto-populated with the text from the Linear issue search field

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug where mailto: in emails were prefixed with https://

  • Fixed a bug where the search input cursor jumped to the end on every keystroke, even when editing in the middle of the input

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Code Blocks

Image showing codeblocks in Plain


What's new

You can now use inline code and code blocks with syntax highlighting when sending emails from Plain. Code blocks will automatically detect language, but you can also set it explicitly with ```<language>.

Now you can also use Bold, italic, lists or block quotes as formatting options. To use them, simply select the text or type standard Markdown syntax. These same formatting options are also supported in snippets. Behind the scenes, we’ve completely rebuilt the composer from the ground up (with some help from Tip Tap) so it’ll feel a lot faster, smoother and more performant.

We’re also excited to officially introduce support for snippet variables, which were an undocumented feature until now. Create new snippets by navigating to Settings > Snippets. Then, simply copy and paste the snippet variable into the "Snippet Content" field within your message and the snippet will be replaced with the corresponding customer data.

Here are some supported variables:

For customer-specific details:

  • {{ customer.email }}: This snippet will automatically fill in the customer's email address.

  • {{ customer.fullName }}: Use this snippet to insert the full name of the customer you're communicating with.

  • {{ customer.shortName }}: Insert this snippet to include the customer's abbreviated or shortened name.

For user-specific details:

  • {{ user.publicName }}: This snippet will populate your own public name within the message.

Note: If the corresponding information is missing from the customer's profile, the snippet variable will be replaced by an empty value. This means that no content will be displayed in place of the snippet variable.

Improvements

  • You can now shift + click to batch select customers in a queue for any bulk action

  • You can now send a message and mark a customer as helped at the same time by using the shortcut ⌘ Command + ⌥ Option + Enter

  • When marking a customer as spam, you now automatically go to the next customer

  • If a customer only has a custom timeline entry in the timeline, the subject in the composer is automatically set to the CTE’s title (if available)

  • When creating a new Linear issue, the title will now be auto-populated with the text from the Linear issue search field

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug where mailto: in emails were prefixed with https://

  • Fixed a bug where the search input cursor jumped to the end on every keystroke, even when editing in the middle of the input

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

Code Blocks

Image showing codeblocks in Plain


What's new

You can now use inline code and code blocks with syntax highlighting when sending emails from Plain. Code blocks will automatically detect language, but you can also set it explicitly with ```<language>.

Now you can also use Bold, italic, lists or block quotes as formatting options. To use them, simply select the text or type standard Markdown syntax. These same formatting options are also supported in snippets. Behind the scenes, we’ve completely rebuilt the composer from the ground up (with some help from Tip Tap) so it’ll feel a lot faster, smoother and more performant.

We’re also excited to officially introduce support for snippet variables, which were an undocumented feature until now. Create new snippets by navigating to Settings > Snippets. Then, simply copy and paste the snippet variable into the "Snippet Content" field within your message and the snippet will be replaced with the corresponding customer data.

Here are some supported variables:

For customer-specific details:

  • {{ customer.email }}: This snippet will automatically fill in the customer's email address.

  • {{ customer.fullName }}: Use this snippet to insert the full name of the customer you're communicating with.

  • {{ customer.shortName }}: Insert this snippet to include the customer's abbreviated or shortened name.

For user-specific details:

  • {{ user.publicName }}: This snippet will populate your own public name within the message.

Note: If the corresponding information is missing from the customer's profile, the snippet variable will be replaced by an empty value. This means that no content will be displayed in place of the snippet variable.

Improvements

  • You can now shift + click to batch select customers in a queue for any bulk action

  • You can now send a message and mark a customer as helped at the same time by using the shortcut ⌘ Command + ⌥ Option + Enter

  • When marking a customer as spam, you now automatically go to the next customer

  • If a customer only has a custom timeline entry in the timeline, the subject in the composer is automatically set to the CTE’s title (if available)

  • When creating a new Linear issue, the title will now be auto-populated with the text from the Linear issue search field

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug where mailto: in emails were prefixed with https://

  • Fixed a bug where the search input cursor jumped to the end on every keystroke, even when editing in the middle of the input

Designed, built and written by

Jordan Drake

Engineering

Elise Bach

Engineering

SOC2 Type II

AICPA SOC 2 TYPE II logo

Security is top of mind for Plain and we’ve made it official with our new SOC 2 Type II attestation, obtained after a rigorous audit to affirm the effectiveness of our security processes and controls.

Among other things, the audit serves to ensure:

  • Our software development lifecycle is transparent, trackable, and controlled (issue tracking, unit testing, version control, etc.)

  • Our application and underlying infrastructure are secure and monitored (encryption, logging, APM, vulnerability scans, etc.)

  • We’ve implemented access controls for internal services and SaaS (de-provisioning accounts, 2FA, malware detection, etc.)

  • There’s been a complete quality oversight of Plain as a whole (performance reviews, background checks, etc.)

While we’re excited to share this milestone with you, SOC 2 Type II is just the baseline. Security means a lot more than just an external audit. It’s how we build things, and a central part of our foundation. We're excited to dive into this topic more soon, so stay tuned.

For customers that would like to receive a copy of the report, please email us.

Designed, built and written by

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

SOC2 Type II

AICPA SOC 2 TYPE II logo

Security is top of mind for Plain and we’ve made it official with our new SOC 2 Type II attestation, obtained after a rigorous audit to affirm the effectiveness of our security processes and controls.

Among other things, the audit serves to ensure:

  • Our software development lifecycle is transparent, trackable, and controlled (issue tracking, unit testing, version control, etc.)

  • Our application and underlying infrastructure are secure and monitored (encryption, logging, APM, vulnerability scans, etc.)

  • We’ve implemented access controls for internal services and SaaS (de-provisioning accounts, 2FA, malware detection, etc.)

  • There’s been a complete quality oversight of Plain as a whole (performance reviews, background checks, etc.)

While we’re excited to share this milestone with you, SOC 2 Type II is just the baseline. Security means a lot more than just an external audit. It’s how we build things, and a central part of our foundation. We're excited to dive into this topic more soon, so stay tuned.

For customers that would like to receive a copy of the report, please email us.

Designed, built and written by

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

SOC2 Type II

AICPA SOC 2 TYPE II logo

Security is top of mind for Plain and we’ve made it official with our new SOC 2 Type II attestation, obtained after a rigorous audit to affirm the effectiveness of our security processes and controls.

Among other things, the audit serves to ensure:

  • Our software development lifecycle is transparent, trackable, and controlled (issue tracking, unit testing, version control, etc.)

  • Our application and underlying infrastructure are secure and monitored (encryption, logging, APM, vulnerability scans, etc.)

  • We’ve implemented access controls for internal services and SaaS (de-provisioning accounts, 2FA, malware detection, etc.)

  • There’s been a complete quality oversight of Plain as a whole (performance reviews, background checks, etc.)

While we’re excited to share this milestone with you, SOC 2 Type II is just the baseline. Security means a lot more than just an external audit. It’s how we build things, and a central part of our foundation. We're excited to dive into this topic more soon, so stay tuned.

For customers that would like to receive a copy of the report, please email us.

Designed, built and written by

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Youmna Sirgi

Founding Ops

Typescript SDK

Image showing Typescript SDK in Plain

For all of its versatility and power, GraphQL can be tricky to set up. Especially if you just want to open an issue in Plain or submit a contact form.

To make it easier to use our API, today we are releasing our first SDK for Typescript and its open source:

https://github.com/team-plain/typescript-sdk

It doesn't allow you to do everything our GraphQL API does but it does handle the majority of use cases (and makes those a breeze).

This first version lets you:

  • Create custom timeline entries to submit contact forms

  • Log events that happen in your systems through timeline entries

  • Create, update and get customers

  • Create issues

  • Add and remove customers from customer groups

For example—this is how you create a customer in Plain:

import { PlainClient } from '../client';

const client = new PlainClient({ apiKey: 'plainApiKey_123' });

const res = await client.upsertCustomer({
  identifier: {
    email: 'jerry@acme.com',
  },
  onCreate: {
    fullName: 'Jerry Field',
    email: {
      email: 'jerry@acme.com',
      isVerified: true,
    },
  },
  onUpdate: {},
});

if (res.error) {
  console.error(res.error);
} else {
  console.log(`Created customer with ${res.data.id}`);
}

To show off the SDK we've built a very fancy example contact form, which you can see here.If you’re looking for some inspiration, check out the code. It's all open source!We'll be extending the functionality of the SDK very soon and creating SDKs for other languages. If you don't work with Typescript—let us know and we can help!

Improvements

  • You can now see the preview of a message in email notifications so you can triage inbound emails more quickly.

  • Improved handling of failures with our Slack notifications app.

  • Improved the timings of the animations when a customer exits a queue.

  • Added queries for myWorkspace, myPermissions and myMachineUser to make it easier to get your workspace, permissions and user when using our API via a Machine User.

Bug fixes

  • Various dark mode fixes to the email composer and customer groups UI.

  • You are no longer stuck on error pages and now have a handy back button which will take you somewhere safe.

  • Fixed a bug which sometimes resulted in customer group counts being incorrect.

  • Fixed a bug which prevented you from navigating back when setting up email as part of the sign-up flow.

  • Fixed a bunch of inconsistent spacing in tags in customer queues.

Designed, built and written by

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Typescript SDK

Image showing Typescript SDK in Plain

For all of its versatility and power, GraphQL can be tricky to set up. Especially if you just want to open an issue in Plain or submit a contact form.

To make it easier to use our API, today we are releasing our first SDK for Typescript and its open source:

https://github.com/team-plain/typescript-sdk

It doesn't allow you to do everything our GraphQL API does but it does handle the majority of use cases (and makes those a breeze).

This first version lets you:

  • Create custom timeline entries to submit contact forms

  • Log events that happen in your systems through timeline entries

  • Create, update and get customers

  • Create issues

  • Add and remove customers from customer groups

For example—this is how you create a customer in Plain:

import { PlainClient } from '../client';

const client = new PlainClient({ apiKey: 'plainApiKey_123' });

const res = await client.upsertCustomer({
  identifier: {
    email: 'jerry@acme.com',
  },
  onCreate: {
    fullName: 'Jerry Field',
    email: {
      email: 'jerry@acme.com',
      isVerified: true,
    },
  },
  onUpdate: {},
});

if (res.error) {
  console.error(res.error);
} else {
  console.log(`Created customer with ${res.data.id}`);
}

To show off the SDK we've built a very fancy example contact form, which you can see here.If you’re looking for some inspiration, check out the code. It's all open source!We'll be extending the functionality of the SDK very soon and creating SDKs for other languages. If you don't work with Typescript—let us know and we can help!

Improvements

  • You can now see the preview of a message in email notifications so you can triage inbound emails more quickly.

  • Improved handling of failures with our Slack notifications app.

  • Improved the timings of the animations when a customer exits a queue.

  • Added queries for myWorkspace, myPermissions and myMachineUser to make it easier to get your workspace, permissions and user when using our API via a Machine User.

Bug fixes

  • Various dark mode fixes to the email composer and customer groups UI.

  • You are no longer stuck on error pages and now have a handy back button which will take you somewhere safe.

  • Fixed a bug which sometimes resulted in customer group counts being incorrect.

  • Fixed a bug which prevented you from navigating back when setting up email as part of the sign-up flow.

  • Fixed a bunch of inconsistent spacing in tags in customer queues.

Designed, built and written by

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Typescript SDK

Image showing Typescript SDK in Plain

For all of its versatility and power, GraphQL can be tricky to set up. Especially if you just want to open an issue in Plain or submit a contact form.

To make it easier to use our API, today we are releasing our first SDK for Typescript and its open source:

https://github.com/team-plain/typescript-sdk

It doesn't allow you to do everything our GraphQL API does but it does handle the majority of use cases (and makes those a breeze).

This first version lets you:

  • Create custom timeline entries to submit contact forms

  • Log events that happen in your systems through timeline entries

  • Create, update and get customers

  • Create issues

  • Add and remove customers from customer groups

For example—this is how you create a customer in Plain:

import { PlainClient } from '../client';

const client = new PlainClient({ apiKey: 'plainApiKey_123' });

const res = await client.upsertCustomer({
  identifier: {
    email: 'jerry@acme.com',
  },
  onCreate: {
    fullName: 'Jerry Field',
    email: {
      email: 'jerry@acme.com',
      isVerified: true,
    },
  },
  onUpdate: {},
});

if (res.error) {
  console.error(res.error);
} else {
  console.log(`Created customer with ${res.data.id}`);
}

To show off the SDK we've built a very fancy example contact form, which you can see here.If you’re looking for some inspiration, check out the code. It's all open source!We'll be extending the functionality of the SDK very soon and creating SDKs for other languages. If you don't work with Typescript—let us know and we can help!

Improvements

  • You can now see the preview of a message in email notifications so you can triage inbound emails more quickly.

  • Improved handling of failures with our Slack notifications app.

  • Improved the timings of the animations when a customer exits a queue.

  • Added queries for myWorkspace, myPermissions and myMachineUser to make it easier to get your workspace, permissions and user when using our API via a Machine User.

Bug fixes

  • Various dark mode fixes to the email composer and customer groups UI.

  • You are no longer stuck on error pages and now have a handy back button which will take you somewhere safe.

  • Fixed a bug which sometimes resulted in customer group counts being incorrect.

  • Fixed a bug which prevented you from navigating back when setting up email as part of the sign-up flow.

  • Fixed a bunch of inconsistent spacing in tags in customer queues.

Designed, built and written by

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Customer Groups

Image showing customer groups in Plain

All customer questions are important, but in our latest release, we give you a small, but mighty way to prioritize them—all in the name of efficiency.

Customer groups allow you to tag customers based on your team’s priorities: company size, plan type, LTV, product usage, and so on. Groups allow you to stay focused on the customers that matter to you.

Groups can be set and managed both through our app and programmatically. Groups managed through the API ensure Plain always matches your internal customer data – for example, to reflect the plan a customer is on.

Groups managed through the app are useful for information managed manually, like for example whether someone’s in the onboarding stage.

Create and update groups either in the sidebar, on a customer page, or from Settings.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Customer Groups

Image showing customer groups in Plain

All customer questions are important, but in our latest release, we give you a small, but mighty way to prioritize them—all in the name of efficiency.

Customer groups allow you to tag customers based on your team’s priorities: company size, plan type, LTV, product usage, and so on. Groups allow you to stay focused on the customers that matter to you.

Groups can be set and managed both through our app and programmatically. Groups managed through the API ensure Plain always matches your internal customer data – for example, to reflect the plan a customer is on.

Groups managed through the app are useful for information managed manually, like for example whether someone’s in the onboarding stage.

Create and update groups either in the sidebar, on a customer page, or from Settings.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Customer Groups

Image showing customer groups in Plain

All customer questions are important, but in our latest release, we give you a small, but mighty way to prioritize them—all in the name of efficiency.

Customer groups allow you to tag customers based on your team’s priorities: company size, plan type, LTV, product usage, and so on. Groups allow you to stay focused on the customers that matter to you.

Groups can be set and managed both through our app and programmatically. Groups managed through the API ensure Plain always matches your internal customer data – for example, to reflect the plan a customer is on.

Groups managed through the app are useful for information managed manually, like for example whether someone’s in the onboarding stage.

Create and update groups either in the sidebar, on a customer page, or from Settings.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

New navigation

Image showing new navigation in Plain

In any customer support tool, you spend the majority of your time helping customers. So it’s crucial that you have a smooth flow to go from one customer to the next – particularly when you're just trying to clear out a queue.

Today, we're excited to roll out a completely new version of our navigation, including three changes:

  1. The first major change is that your queue now stays with you as you help customers, so you always know who to help next.

  2. The second change is that the transition from queue to timeline now happens seamlessly, rather than feeling like a hard page refresh. Navigating back and forth between customers now feels buttery smooth, powered by Framer Motion.

  3. Once you're done, we automagically move you on to the next customer.

Finally, we took this opportunity to tidy up how we display customers in a queue. We wanted to use the space more efficiently, be more mobile friendly, and overall, be a little extra crispy.

Improvements

  • Added a new optional Slack notification in case you want to be notified of all messages from customers that you are assigned to.

  • Made several small visual improvements to the timeline.

  • You can now mark customers as spam from both the customer page and command palette. When you mark a customer as spam, they will be hidden from queues, but their emails will continue to be processed and stored in the background.

  • Many, many, and I mean many performance improvements to our API. Things should feel a lot snappier now!

  • When filtering, you can see how many of the total number of customers in a queue are displayed.

  • Notes are visually more distinct so that it’s easier to tell them apart from emails and chats.

  • We now automatically redirect you to the last workspace you visited so you don’t have to select a workspace every time you log in.

Bug fixes

  • We have improved how we handle emails from Google groups and squashed a few edge-case bugs.

  • Fixed a bug which resulted in some keyboard shortcuts still being enabled even when an action was disabled.

  • Fixed a few visual issues with our Linear linking UI which resulted in some clipping.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Elise Bach

Engineering

New navigation

Image showing new navigation in Plain

In any customer support tool, you spend the majority of your time helping customers. So it’s crucial that you have a smooth flow to go from one customer to the next – particularly when you're just trying to clear out a queue.

Today, we're excited to roll out a completely new version of our navigation, including three changes:

  1. The first major change is that your queue now stays with you as you help customers, so you always know who to help next.

  2. The second change is that the transition from queue to timeline now happens seamlessly, rather than feeling like a hard page refresh. Navigating back and forth between customers now feels buttery smooth, powered by Framer Motion.

  3. Once you're done, we automagically move you on to the next customer.

Finally, we took this opportunity to tidy up how we display customers in a queue. We wanted to use the space more efficiently, be more mobile friendly, and overall, be a little extra crispy.

Improvements

  • Added a new optional Slack notification in case you want to be notified of all messages from customers that you are assigned to.

  • Made several small visual improvements to the timeline.

  • You can now mark customers as spam from both the customer page and command palette. When you mark a customer as spam, they will be hidden from queues, but their emails will continue to be processed and stored in the background.

  • Many, many, and I mean many performance improvements to our API. Things should feel a lot snappier now!

  • When filtering, you can see how many of the total number of customers in a queue are displayed.

  • Notes are visually more distinct so that it’s easier to tell them apart from emails and chats.

  • We now automatically redirect you to the last workspace you visited so you don’t have to select a workspace every time you log in.

Bug fixes

  • We have improved how we handle emails from Google groups and squashed a few edge-case bugs.

  • Fixed a bug which resulted in some keyboard shortcuts still being enabled even when an action was disabled.

  • Fixed a few visual issues with our Linear linking UI which resulted in some clipping.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Elise Bach

Engineering

New navigation

Image showing new navigation in Plain

In any customer support tool, you spend the majority of your time helping customers. So it’s crucial that you have a smooth flow to go from one customer to the next – particularly when you're just trying to clear out a queue.

Today, we're excited to roll out a completely new version of our navigation, including three changes:

  1. The first major change is that your queue now stays with you as you help customers, so you always know who to help next.

  2. The second change is that the transition from queue to timeline now happens seamlessly, rather than feeling like a hard page refresh. Navigating back and forth between customers now feels buttery smooth, powered by Framer Motion.

  3. Once you're done, we automagically move you on to the next customer.

Finally, we took this opportunity to tidy up how we display customers in a queue. We wanted to use the space more efficiently, be more mobile friendly, and overall, be a little extra crispy.

Improvements

  • Added a new optional Slack notification in case you want to be notified of all messages from customers that you are assigned to.

  • Made several small visual improvements to the timeline.

  • You can now mark customers as spam from both the customer page and command palette. When you mark a customer as spam, they will be hidden from queues, but their emails will continue to be processed and stored in the background.

  • Many, many, and I mean many performance improvements to our API. Things should feel a lot snappier now!

  • When filtering, you can see how many of the total number of customers in a queue are displayed.

  • Notes are visually more distinct so that it’s easier to tell them apart from emails and chats.

  • We now automatically redirect you to the last workspace you visited so you don’t have to select a workspace every time you log in.

Bug fixes

  • We have improved how we handle emails from Google groups and squashed a few edge-case bugs.

  • Fixed a bug which resulted in some keyboard shortcuts still being enabled even when an action was disabled.

  • Fixed a few visual issues with our Linear linking UI which resulted in some clipping.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Elise Bach

Engineering

Issue Filtering and Issue Icons

Image showing issue filtering in Plain

You can now set your own icons for issue types. To do so, head to Settings -> Issue Types, and you can choose from a variety of icons (our personal favorites are the 🍪 and the 🐷). We’ll be adding icons to this list, so let us know if there is something specific you want to see.

Improvements

  • Improved the empty state when a customer has no open issues.

  • Visually improved how issue priorities are displayed for better clarity.

  • Improved documentation of Webhooks for event payloads.

  • Improved documentation of error codes to be clearer and more comprehensive, even of rare edge cases.

  • You can now click on an open (non-deleted) issue in the timeline to open up the issue panel in the sidebar.

  • Made it clearer in the UI that notes are not visible by customers.

  • Improved handling of Linear issues within Plain when you have not connected your Linear account.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug which sometimes resulted in the back button from the customer page not consistently taking you back to the correct customer queue for customers with more than one workspace.

  • Fixed a bug which allowed you to link a Linear issue to a Plain issue multiple times.

  • Fixed a bug which resulted in rare cases of receiving duplicate notifications when using custom timeline entries to make a customer active.

  • Fixed a bug which meant we were not showing the customer’s external id correctly in the side panel.

  • Fixed a bug which resulted in customer card content sometimes causing the row component to visually break.

  • Fixed a bug which meant that the composer didn’t grow vertically, making it hard to write long emails.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Issue Filtering and Issue Icons

Image showing issue filtering in Plain

You can now set your own icons for issue types. To do so, head to Settings -> Issue Types, and you can choose from a variety of icons (our personal favorites are the 🍪 and the 🐷). We’ll be adding icons to this list, so let us know if there is something specific you want to see.

Improvements

  • Improved the empty state when a customer has no open issues.

  • Visually improved how issue priorities are displayed for better clarity.

  • Improved documentation of Webhooks for event payloads.

  • Improved documentation of error codes to be clearer and more comprehensive, even of rare edge cases.

  • You can now click on an open (non-deleted) issue in the timeline to open up the issue panel in the sidebar.

  • Made it clearer in the UI that notes are not visible by customers.

  • Improved handling of Linear issues within Plain when you have not connected your Linear account.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug which sometimes resulted in the back button from the customer page not consistently taking you back to the correct customer queue for customers with more than one workspace.

  • Fixed a bug which allowed you to link a Linear issue to a Plain issue multiple times.

  • Fixed a bug which resulted in rare cases of receiving duplicate notifications when using custom timeline entries to make a customer active.

  • Fixed a bug which meant we were not showing the customer’s external id correctly in the side panel.

  • Fixed a bug which resulted in customer card content sometimes causing the row component to visually break.

  • Fixed a bug which meant that the composer didn’t grow vertically, making it hard to write long emails.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Issue Filtering and Issue Icons

Image showing issue filtering in Plain

You can now set your own icons for issue types. To do so, head to Settings -> Issue Types, and you can choose from a variety of icons (our personal favorites are the 🍪 and the 🐷). We’ll be adding icons to this list, so let us know if there is something specific you want to see.

Improvements

  • Improved the empty state when a customer has no open issues.

  • Visually improved how issue priorities are displayed for better clarity.

  • Improved documentation of Webhooks for event payloads.

  • Improved documentation of error codes to be clearer and more comprehensive, even of rare edge cases.

  • You can now click on an open (non-deleted) issue in the timeline to open up the issue panel in the sidebar.

  • Made it clearer in the UI that notes are not visible by customers.

  • Improved handling of Linear issues within Plain when you have not connected your Linear account.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug which sometimes resulted in the back button from the customer page not consistently taking you back to the correct customer queue for customers with more than one workspace.

  • Fixed a bug which allowed you to link a Linear issue to a Plain issue multiple times.

  • Fixed a bug which resulted in rare cases of receiving duplicate notifications when using custom timeline entries to make a customer active.

  • Fixed a bug which meant we were not showing the customer’s external id correctly in the side panel.

  • Fixed a bug which resulted in customer card content sometimes causing the row component to visually break.

  • Fixed a bug which meant that the composer didn’t grow vertically, making it hard to write long emails.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Dark mode

Image showing darkmode in Plain

This one’s for all you early birds, night owls and new parents.

Today we’re rolling out dark mode. 🌙 🥳 Plain will use your system settings by default but you can change this in settings.

As part of this work we've also tidied up a bunch of smaller UI details on how we handle icons and color throughout Plain. Hopefully should all be looking that little bit tidier and smoother.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Elise Bach

Engineering

Dark mode

Image showing darkmode in Plain

This one’s for all you early birds, night owls and new parents.

Today we’re rolling out dark mode. 🌙 🥳 Plain will use your system settings by default but you can change this in settings.

As part of this work we've also tidied up a bunch of smaller UI details on how we handle icons and color throughout Plain. Hopefully should all be looking that little bit tidier and smoother.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Elise Bach

Engineering

Dark mode

Image showing darkmode in Plain

This one’s for all you early birds, night owls and new parents.

Today we’re rolling out dark mode. 🌙 🥳 Plain will use your system settings by default but you can change this in settings.

As part of this work we've also tidied up a bunch of smaller UI details on how we handle icons and color throughout Plain. Hopefully should all be looking that little bit tidier and smoother.

Designed, built and written by

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Elise Bach

Engineering

Linear Integration

We're excited to release our Linear integration today.

This integration allows you to link Plain and Linear, so you can easily log issues your customers have encountered directly from Plain, and close the loop with your customers whenever there’s been an update on an issue in Linear.

To be added to the early access list for this feature, reach out to us through in-app support.

Improvements

  • New email notifications: When a customer is assigned to you, you will now get an email notification to let you know. This matches how Slack notifications work and can be toggled on/off in your notification settings.

  • Back to queue: We’ve made it easier to navigate from a customer timeline back to a queue, which used to take a couple of clicks. Now, just click the "Back to queue" button in the sidebar and you'll be taken right back to where you were.

  • A snappier composer: We've completely rebuilt our chat and email composer under the hood for much faster performance.

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Linear Integration

We're excited to release our Linear integration today.

This integration allows you to link Plain and Linear, so you can easily log issues your customers have encountered directly from Plain, and close the loop with your customers whenever there’s been an update on an issue in Linear.

To be added to the early access list for this feature, reach out to us through in-app support.

Improvements

  • New email notifications: When a customer is assigned to you, you will now get an email notification to let you know. This matches how Slack notifications work and can be toggled on/off in your notification settings.

  • Back to queue: We’ve made it easier to navigate from a customer timeline back to a queue, which used to take a couple of clicks. Now, just click the "Back to queue" button in the sidebar and you'll be taken right back to where you were.

  • A snappier composer: We've completely rebuilt our chat and email composer under the hood for much faster performance.

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Linear Integration

We're excited to release our Linear integration today.

This integration allows you to link Plain and Linear, so you can easily log issues your customers have encountered directly from Plain, and close the loop with your customers whenever there’s been an update on an issue in Linear.

To be added to the early access list for this feature, reach out to us through in-app support.

Improvements

  • New email notifications: When a customer is assigned to you, you will now get an email notification to let you know. This matches how Slack notifications work and can be toggled on/off in your notification settings.

  • Back to queue: We’ve made it easier to navigate from a customer timeline back to a queue, which used to take a couple of clicks. Now, just click the "Back to queue" button in the sidebar and you'll be taken right back to where you were.

  • A snappier composer: We've completely rebuilt our chat and email composer under the hood for much faster performance.

Designed, built and written by

Elise Bach

Engineering

Mitchell Petrie

Design

Webhooks

Image showing webhooks in Plain

Many people have asked us for webhooks, and it’s been something we’ve been wanting to build for a long time. Webhooks enable you to receive notifications for specific events programmatically.

For instance, you can automate notifications from incoming emails and take action by creating an issue or updating a custom timeline entry. Or you could react to a customer becoming active by assigning them to someone in your team.

Check out our docs for more information on how you can utilize webhooks.

Designed, built and written by

Webhooks

Image showing webhooks in Plain

Many people have asked us for webhooks, and it’s been something we’ve been wanting to build for a long time. Webhooks enable you to receive notifications for specific events programmatically.

For instance, you can automate notifications from incoming emails and take action by creating an issue or updating a custom timeline entry. Or you could react to a customer becoming active by assigning them to someone in your team.

Check out our docs for more information on how you can utilize webhooks.

Designed, built and written by

Webhooks

Image showing webhooks in Plain

Many people have asked us for webhooks, and it’s been something we’ve been wanting to build for a long time. Webhooks enable you to receive notifications for specific events programmatically.

For instance, you can automate notifications from incoming emails and take action by creating an issue or updating a custom timeline entry. Or you could react to a customer becoming active by assigning them to someone in your team.

Check out our docs for more information on how you can utilize webhooks.

Designed, built and written by

Events API

Image showing Plain's events API

Today we are releasing a new Events API that allows you to log key events in your own product within Plain. This enables you to offer support more quickly and with the full context of what happened and why.

There are two types of events, customer events and thread events.

Customer events

Customer events let you add context about a customer to all new and existing threads. These events will be shown in the customer’s threads when you are helping them.

For example, let’s say you have an API as part of your product. You could log usage limits being hit within Plain. When one of your customers gets in touch about their API calls 403, you will immediately have all the context you need in Plain to help them.

Image showing customer events in Plain

Thread events

Thread events allow you to add context to a specific thread. Unlike customer events, thread events are only visible in the thread you specify.

For example, if a thread is created about an invoice - any updates to that payment could be logged to the thread so that you have the full history of what happened when helping a customer without leaving Plain.

Image showing thread events in Plain

Events make it possible for you to stay in the flow when helping customers without having to switch tabs and piece together what happened manually.

For the full documentation on how events work, check out our docs:

Events Documentation

Improvements

  • Improvements to Insights dashboard - Last week, we released an Insights dashboard, which shows you activity across your workspace. This week, we've made the dashboard clickable so that you can filter down to specific threads

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Events API

Image showing Plain's events API

Today we are releasing a new Events API that allows you to log key events in your own product within Plain. This enables you to offer support more quickly and with the full context of what happened and why.

There are two types of events, customer events and thread events.

Customer events

Customer events let you add context about a customer to all new and existing threads. These events will be shown in the customer’s threads when you are helping them.

For example, let’s say you have an API as part of your product. You could log usage limits being hit within Plain. When one of your customers gets in touch about their API calls 403, you will immediately have all the context you need in Plain to help them.

Image showing customer events in Plain

Thread events

Thread events allow you to add context to a specific thread. Unlike customer events, thread events are only visible in the thread you specify.

For example, if a thread is created about an invoice - any updates to that payment could be logged to the thread so that you have the full history of what happened when helping a customer without leaving Plain.

Image showing thread events in Plain

Events make it possible for you to stay in the flow when helping customers without having to switch tabs and piece together what happened manually.

For the full documentation on how events work, check out our docs:

Events Documentation

Improvements

  • Improvements to Insights dashboard - Last week, we released an Insights dashboard, which shows you activity across your workspace. This week, we've made the dashboard clickable so that you can filter down to specific threads

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

Events API

Image showing Plain's events API

Today we are releasing a new Events API that allows you to log key events in your own product within Plain. This enables you to offer support more quickly and with the full context of what happened and why.

There are two types of events, customer events and thread events.

Customer events

Customer events let you add context about a customer to all new and existing threads. These events will be shown in the customer’s threads when you are helping them.

For example, let’s say you have an API as part of your product. You could log usage limits being hit within Plain. When one of your customers gets in touch about their API calls 403, you will immediately have all the context you need in Plain to help them.

Image showing customer events in Plain

Thread events

Thread events allow you to add context to a specific thread. Unlike customer events, thread events are only visible in the thread you specify.

For example, if a thread is created about an invoice - any updates to that payment could be logged to the thread so that you have the full history of what happened when helping a customer without leaving Plain.

Image showing thread events in Plain

Events make it possible for you to stay in the flow when helping customers without having to switch tabs and piece together what happened manually.

For the full documentation on how events work, check out our docs:

Events Documentation

Improvements

  • Improvements to Insights dashboard - Last week, we released an Insights dashboard, which shows you activity across your workspace. This week, we've made the dashboard clickable so that you can filter down to specific threads

Designed, built and written by

Andrew Blaney

Engineering

Matt Vagni

Co-founder & CTO

An all-new workflow, redesigned for scale

Image showing Plain's new workflow

Today, we’re introducing the biggest change since we started the company. We’ve completely rebuilt our data model and workflow from the ground up.

Until now, each conversation with a customer happened on a single, merged timeline. With this release, each conversation is now contained in its own thread, with its own priorities, assignments, labels and so on.

We’ve made this change to better serve B2B teams where issues are complex, teams often have several ongoing conversations with the same customer and they often involve multiple team members and colleagues with different specialisms.

Here’s what you can do on a thread:

  • Set Labels, previously called Issues

  • Set a Priority, which can be Urgent, High, Medium or Low

  • Set a Status, which is either Todo, Snoozed, or Done

  • Assign a thread to one of your team

  • Get more visibility with Reasons. Each reason tells you why a thread is there – for example, "New Reply" or "Unsnoozed”

In this release, we also added:

  • Redesigned Slack notifications that automatically update with any changes, like assignee or status

  • New and improved Discord notifications

  • Time-based snoozing so we remind you to address them later (e.g. “Snooze until next week”)

  • Simplified and more powerful APIs for thread creation and management

  • Improved Webhooks with more specific events, allowing you to focus on what matters to you, such as email_received or thread_assignment_transitioned.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

An all-new workflow, redesigned for scale

Image showing Plain's new workflow

Today, we’re introducing the biggest change since we started the company. We’ve completely rebuilt our data model and workflow from the ground up.

Until now, each conversation with a customer happened on a single, merged timeline. With this release, each conversation is now contained in its own thread, with its own priorities, assignments, labels and so on.

We’ve made this change to better serve B2B teams where issues are complex, teams often have several ongoing conversations with the same customer and they often involve multiple team members and colleagues with different specialisms.

Here’s what you can do on a thread:

  • Set Labels, previously called Issues

  • Set a Priority, which can be Urgent, High, Medium or Low

  • Set a Status, which is either Todo, Snoozed, or Done

  • Assign a thread to one of your team

  • Get more visibility with Reasons. Each reason tells you why a thread is there – for example, "New Reply" or "Unsnoozed”

In this release, we also added:

  • Redesigned Slack notifications that automatically update with any changes, like assignee or status

  • New and improved Discord notifications

  • Time-based snoozing so we remind you to address them later (e.g. “Snooze until next week”)

  • Simplified and more powerful APIs for thread creation and management

  • Improved Webhooks with more specific events, allowing you to focus on what matters to you, such as email_received or thread_assignment_transitioned.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO

An all-new workflow, redesigned for scale

Image showing Plain's new workflow

Today, we’re introducing the biggest change since we started the company. We’ve completely rebuilt our data model and workflow from the ground up.

Until now, each conversation with a customer happened on a single, merged timeline. With this release, each conversation is now contained in its own thread, with its own priorities, assignments, labels and so on.

We’ve made this change to better serve B2B teams where issues are complex, teams often have several ongoing conversations with the same customer and they often involve multiple team members and colleagues with different specialisms.

Here’s what you can do on a thread:

  • Set Labels, previously called Issues

  • Set a Priority, which can be Urgent, High, Medium or Low

  • Set a Status, which is either Todo, Snoozed, or Done

  • Assign a thread to one of your team

  • Get more visibility with Reasons. Each reason tells you why a thread is there – for example, "New Reply" or "Unsnoozed”

In this release, we also added:

  • Redesigned Slack notifications that automatically update with any changes, like assignee or status

  • New and improved Discord notifications

  • Time-based snoozing so we remind you to address them later (e.g. “Snooze until next week”)

  • Simplified and more powerful APIs for thread creation and management

  • Improved Webhooks with more specific events, allowing you to focus on what matters to you, such as email_received or thread_assignment_transitioned.

Designed, built and written by

Simon Rohrbach

Co-founder & CEO