May 3, 2023

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