Clerk is on a mission to build the auth platform for the next generation of billion-dollar companies. Here’s how they do support.

Clerk offers a complete suite of embeddable UIs, flexible APIs, and admin dashboard designed to manage and authenticate your app’s users. 

Clerk’s approach to customer support is quite unique for technical support – their Developer Success team takes care of support. But they also work on internal tools, docs, product updates and features. This setup means they need a support platform that allows them to create feature requests and bug reports directly from support requests, and collaborate on technical issues easily and effectively. 

“Supporting our customers with Plain has allowed us to bring the customer voice much more in touch with our entire company.”

Tackling one of the hardest parts of support: prioritization 

Clerk caters to a wide range of users, from small startups to larger enterprises. Their generous free tier means a significant portion of their support goes to users who aren’t paying. Beyond this, Clerk also offers a base tier, a pro-level tier, and an enterprise tier, each with varying levels of support.

This diversity in their pricing tiers created a challenge for Clerk: how to prioritize support requests when a customer could be a member of multiple apps, with different pricing tiers. Using Plain, Clerk built a couple of really useful custom workflows, powering our out of the box features like tiers and tenants with our API, to ensure that their support system works efficiently and prioritizes requests correctly.

“We love that we can extend Plain how we want to via the API. If we need to build something to improve our support workflows or internal tooling, we can always build it ourselves”

Workflow #1: Through tenant and tiers mapping 

When a customer reaches out to Clerk with a support request, Clerk receives a webhook from Plain, searches their database to identify the customer, and maps the user to the appropriate tenants and tiers in Plain. They’ll then prioritize the request based on the highest-tier app the customer belongs to. While this is quite effective, a user could be part of an enterprise app, but reach out to support for help with their hobby app. To address this, the team at Clerk implemented a second, more robust workflow. 

Workflow #2: Using in-app forms 

Clerk created an in-app support form via Plain’s API that pre-populates the customer’s email and includes a dropdown menu for selecting the specific app they need help with. This allows Clerk to not only identify the user but also know which app and tier the support request relates to, for better prioritization. Having key customer information auto-populated from their contact form also means less back-and-forth with the customer, allowing for faster resolution times and happier customers. 

Beyond these two useful workflows, there are a few Plain features that the team at Clerk find incredibly useful: 

• Discussions
  Before we released Discussions, Clerk’s team would manually link support threads in Slack and drop notes straight in the support thread. With Discussions, this step has been automated, enabling faster collaboration across teams.

• API Configurability
  The Clerk team love that they can “extend Plain however we want to” to fit use cases that are quite specific to how their team works. For example, they’re training an internal AI bot right now that’s taught by data pulled straight from support tickets in Plain.

• Labels
  Labels are how the team at Clerk transfers knowledge directly from support threads to their product teams. If certain labels appear frequently, it signals the need for product improvements or bug fixes. Clerk also uses label volume anomaly detection to identify potential issues early and take action immediately. 

What’s next for support at Clerk? 

The team at Clerk is currently training an AI bot using data sourced from Plain that will be able to suggest similar questions or a proposed answer based on previous support threads, to make their Developer Success team more efficient. Eventually, they would like to find a way to make this bot available directly to customers to offer an option for an instant response.

Clerk also requested a Discord integration so they can manage their support from Discord directly in Plain. We’re about to start work on this feature to bring a whole new channel to Plain. 

By using Plain for their support, Clerk has created a support powerhouse within their Developer Success team, aligning with the value their whole company places on customer support. We’re so excited to see what they use our API for next as they continue to build out amazing workflows and use cases.