Kinde is authentication for modern applications – built to help startups accelerate their application development with authentication, user management, feature flags, billing and more, all managed in one powerful back office.

Kinde’s customer support philosophy centers on being available wherever their customers need them. Whether it’s shared Slack channels, Slack community, Discord, live chat, or email, the team works hard to meet customers on their preferred platforms. As they've scaled, demand for additional customer channels has grown. It became increasingly harder for the team to track and respond to every request – leading to missed messages. 

With Intercom, Kinde found themselves missing support requests – especially those that originated in Slack. Alongside missed messages, the team felt like they weren’t delivering the level of service they wanted to, so started checking out other tools. Options like Zendesk and Freshdesk promised functionality but came with costly add-ons to properly handle multi-channel support. Kinde needed a consolidated support platform that wouldn’t break the bank and leave them relying on third party plugins.

Consolidating support channels

Kinde turned to Plain to bring all their support channels into one platform. Having the ability to consolidate notifications and conversations from different customer channels was item #1 on their support platform wishlist.

They needed a way to bring all their support channels into one place. Juggling notifications and conversations across multiple tools made it hard to keep up with their customer requests.

With Plain, they’ve got a setup that makes it easy to tailor support to their customers’ needs. High-value customers and prospects get dedicated Slack channels with the Kinde team. Free-tier users are supported in a Slack community and on Discord. For their VIP customers, Kinde’s SLA package, “Kinde Care,” offers an extra layer of attention.

By streamlining every support channel into one platform, the team doesn’t miss messages anymore, and there’s always clear ownership of tickets. It’s a structure that ensures VIP customers get the service they expect, without needing to change how they reach out.

“We’re finally able to deliver technical support at scale to all of our support channels – including Slack connect, Slack community, email, and live chat” – said Andre, Partnerships Manager at Kinde.

Improving technical support 

Technical support is important to get right – it's the biggest opportunity for you to build trust with your customers. Kinde's support is mostly technical, and their team found Plain's features to be a perfect match for their technical support needs. AI-powered thread summaries give them quick overviews of ongoing conversations, helping team members catch up fast. Internal notes made handoffs between colleagues smooth, especially when one of their teammates went on PTO. 

One feature that's really sped up how their team does technical support is AI-powered suggested responeses. By uploading their docs as a knowledge source, they enabled AI responses that felt detailed, natural, and consistent with their brand tone and voice. These features, combined with our solid developer experience and intuitive design, have sped up how the Kinde team delivers support, while keeping their quality bar high. Their FRT is 40% faster with Plain than it was with Intercom.

Kinde's internal collaboration between support and engineering improved as a result of their migration. With features like Discussions they can easily pull engineers into support requests without having to add their engineer to every single Slack channel.

Scaling support

As Kinde continues to scale, their support operations will need to scale effectively with them. Over the next year, they're planning on onboarding contract support agents in different timezones, to make sure their customers can get support whenever they need to, wherever they need to. They’re also exploring integrations with incident management tools to streamline their responses and processes around incidents.

Kinde is well-positioned to provide top-notch support as they continue to scale, ensuring their customers are always taken care of – no matter what channel they reach out through.