Buildkite provides the industry’s first Scale-Out Delivery Platform, the only software delivery solution capable of providing the speed and adaptability required to deliver software at scale in the AI era. Buildkite’s customers, which include Airbnb, Block, Canva, PagerDuty, Pinterest, Shopify, Slack, Tinder, and Uber, rely on Buildkite to power their engineering teams and deliver software to their customers' users. 

With a growing customer base – including some of the world’s most innovative engineering teams – Buildkite needed a scalable support platform that could meet the high bar they set for customer experience. For Buildkite’s customers, software delivery is mission-critical, and the support they expect is equally high-stakes. 

The Buildkite team acts as an extension of their customers’ teams – dropping everything to help them solve challenges quickly. To continue delivering that level of service across their support channels like Slack and email, they needed a support tool built for scale, visibility, and speed – without compromising the quality of their support experience.

The challenge: why high-stakes support demands more than a ticketing system 

Buildkite’s support team operates on a follow-the-sun model, covering multiple regions with dedicated engineers across APAC, Europe, and the Americas. Their premium support customers expect sub-10-minute response times, and most interactions with their customers happen in Slack Connect channels.

JJ, who oversees the Technical Services function, made up of Customer Support, Technical Account Management and Solution Architects, explained, “We don’t believe in traditional ticketing systems. Our customers should feel like they’re having a conversation with an extension of their team, not submitting a ticket into a black hole.”

Their previous tool lacked the capabilities Buildkite needed to scale modern B2B support. There was no way to properly track Slack-based customer interactions, leading to slower response times and lost context. The team also lacked the analytics they needed to accurately measure their SLAs and response times – relying instead on manual workarounds. Fragmented notifications from different customer channels meant engineers were constantly spending too much time context-switching, making it harder to focus on meaningful support interactions.

Why Plain stood out

Buildkite evaluated a few tools alongside Plain, but ultimately chose Plain for its ability to unify customer interactions, provide actionable insights, and enable powerful company-wide collaboration. 

JJ shared, “We were already looking for something to centralize notifications and reduce fatigue on our team. When we found Plain, it was a more polished solution than the others for our needs.”

A key factor in their decision was Plain’s commitment to security and data privacy, something JJ noted was rare for a company at this stage. “For a relatively young company, Plain has robust data policies. It’s one of the first things we need to consider, and Plain absolutely delivers.” Knowing that customer data would be handled securely was critical for Buildkite’s enterprise clients, and Plain exceeded their expectations.

Ease of implementation was another major advantage. Buildkite’s team was able to set up Plain quickly and with minimal effort, unlike other platforms that need months-long onboarding cycles. 

JJ noted, "It was ridiculously easy to get up and running. We expected some friction, but it just worked." 

Instead of spending weeks migrating workflows and historical customer data, the team could immediately start managing support in Plain with zero disruption to customers.

The solution: structured, scalable, and secure support

Switching to Plain gave Buildkite a structured, high-visibility support platform totally tailored to their team. With all of their Slack and email interactions centralized into one source of truth, the team could easily track and manage customer requests without jumping between tools. This had a huge impact on their ability to measure SLAs, ensuring they met their 5-minute internal response time goal for premium customers.

Engineers now get centralized notifications for all their support requests, reducing notification fatigue and improving focus. Instead of being overwhelmed by scattered alerts, support engineers can track open requests more effectively and respond faster. Additionally, custom fields and AI-powered tagging have given Buildkite deeper insights into customer issues. By automatically flagging potential bugs and surfacing trends, the team can prioritize building the improvements that have the greatest impact on their users.

Security and compliance were also key considerations for their team. With Plain, Buildkite now has a structured approach to handling customer data, ensuring they can securely delete data across the system when required and meet strict security expectations from enterprise customers. This has reinforced trust with their larger clients and given the team confidence that their support operations are built on a solid foundation with Plain.

Migrating to Plain was fast and effortless. Unlike traditional enterprise support platforms that require weeks of setup, Buildkite was able to migrate faster than they thought was possible. This allowed the team to focus on improving their support, without a long migration path.

The impact: better visibility, faster responses, and stronger security at scale

Since switching to Plain, Buildkite has improved support visibility across the entire company. With Slack and email requests fully tracked in one place, conversations are no longer lost, and support engineers can respond faster and more accurately. The ability to measure SLA performance in real-time has helped the team to refine their processes and continuously improve response times.

Plain’s AI-powered tagging has also surfaced hidden trends in customer conversations, helping the team identify recurring issues and prioritize fixes. Instead of relying on engineers to manually categorize every issue, Plain automates this process, making it easier to spot product gaps and areas for improvement. 

These insights don’t just improve support – they actively feed back into product development, helping the team identify where the product can evolve to better serve their customers.

Beyond efficiency, security and compliance have been a major win. Buildkite’s enterprise customers require strong data protection policies, and Plain has met these standards from day one. With the ability to manage and delete customer data securely, Buildkite can confidently support larger accounts while maintaining the trust and compliance needed to scale.

JJ emphasized, “Now we can actually see where we’re hitting or missing our SLAs and make informed decisions to improve. It’s made a huge difference.”

What’s next for Buildkite’s support team

Buildkite plans to grow support coverage beyond Slack and email, giving customers more flexibility in how they interact with the team. They also plan to integrate GitHub into Plain, further streamlining how support, engineering, and product teams collaborate.

With Plain as the backbone of their support operations, Buildkite is well-positioned to scale while maintaining its high-touch, customer-first approach.