Northflank provides a powerful cloud platform that enables developers to build, deploy, and manage applications with ease. As a company deeply focused on developer experience, delivering fast, efficient, and highly technical support is key to their success.

As Northflank scaled, their support workflows became a bottleneck. Managing customer queries across a growing number of enterprise Slack channels, email, and their app led to fragmented conversations, delayed responses, and difficulty escalating issues to engineering.

By adopting Plain for their B2B support, Northflank streamlined its entire support process – bringing all customer conversations into a unified workspace, automating workflows, and integrating deeply with their engineering stack. With Plain, Northflank improved their FRT by 50%, collaborate better internally, and have a scalable support operation that grows with their company.

“Before Plain, managing support across email and Slack was chaotic. We were constantly losing track of conversations, and it was hard to escalate issues to engineering. Now, everything is in one place, and our team collaborates more effectively than ever. Plain has completely changed how we approach support" – Will Stewart, Co-Founder & CEO at Northflank.

The Challenge: Support Operation at Scale

With a growing user base, Northflank faced several pressing support challenges:

• Managing too many customer Slack channels – Enterprise customers primarily reached out via Slack, but without a structured system, conversations became difficult to track and manage effectively.

• Fragmented conversations across multiple support channels – Customers also reached out via email, leading to disjointed interactions and difficulty tracking issue progress with engineering.

• Lack of context in support requests – Developers often submitted issues with insufficient details, leading to lengthy back-and-forth exchanges just to collect the necessary information.

• Manual, inefficient workflows – Without structured ticket routing, engineers spent valuable time manually triaging and handling support requests.

• Ineffective escalation to engineering – There was no seamless way for support agents to escalate complex issues to developers, slowing down critical resolutions.

• Inflexible, rigid support workflow – Traditional support platforms weren’t built for developer-first companies, and couldn’t support Northflank’s high-touch technical support.

Northflank needed a modern support platform that could match their technical B2B support needs, streamline workflows, and reduce support overhead.

The Solution: A Consolidated Developer-First Support Experience

Northflank adopted Plain to build a seamless, developer-friendly support system that eliminates friction and optimizes technical issue resolution.

1. Centralizing support for a single source of truth

Instead of juggling Slack, email, and Linear in silos, Northflank consolidated all of their customer interactions into Plain. Now, regardless of where a customer reaches out, every conversation is captured and managed in one workspace – eliminating missed messages and ensuring no request slips through the cracks.

2. Managing an increasing number of customer Slack channels at scale

With Plain, Northflank seamlessly handles many enterprise Slack channels, ensuring that every request is tracked, prioritized, and resolved efficiently. This previously chaotic process is now centralized and fully manageable.

3. Embedding structured support directly into their product

Using Plain’s API, Northflank integrated structured support forms directly into their app. These forms automatically capture critical debugging information – like logs, environment details, and error messages – ensuring their team has all the context they need upfront to resolve issues faster.

4. Automating workflows & smarter request routing

Plain enabled Northflank to automate customer request triaging, categorization, and prioritization. Now, requests reach the right person without manual effort, allowing engineers to focus on solving problems and building relationships, rather than managing tickets.

5. Streamlining escalations to engineering

With Plain’s deep integration into development tools like Linear, Northflank’s support team can seamlessly escalate issues to engineers. Bugs and feature requests are directly linked to their internal workflow, ensuring a smooth handoff and faster resolution times. Plain’s organized statuses ensure that the team has visibility into the threads that are waiting on customers, and the threads that they’re investigating. 

6. Creating a collaborative support workflow

By centralizing communication and integrating Slack discussions, Northflank fostered a more collaborative approach to support. Engineers can now participate in real-time troubleshooting, reducing friction between teams and improving resolution speed.

The Impact: Faster, More Scalable Support

Since implementing Plain, Northflank has transformed its support operations:

• 50% faster response times – With structured in-app support and automated workflows, agents can diagnose and resolve issues significantly faster.

• Reduced back-and-forth communication – By capturing the right debugging information upfront, support agents cut down unnecessary follow-ups and resolve issues more efficiently.

• Seamless collaboration between support and engineering – Engineers now have direct visibility into customer-reported issues, enabling faster bug fixes and better product iteration.

• Scalable and developer-friendly support – Northflank’s support now scales effortlessly, with 2x more of their team now having visibility into support.

• A unified support experience – Every customer conversation is now tracked in one place, improving transparency, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

“Having all customer interactions – email, Slack, and more – in one place means we can respond faster and collaborate seamlessly. We no longer have to guess what’s outstanding or where a conversation happened" – Will Stewart, Co-Founder & CEO at Northflank.

Why Northflank Chose Plain

For Northflank, choosing Plain was about more than just improving response times – it was about transforming support into a seamless, scalable process that aligns with their developer-first philosophy. 

With Plain, they could embed structured support directly into their app, automate workflows without rigid ticketing systems, and give engineers direct access to customer issues. This meant fewer silos, better collaboration, and a support platform that grows alongside their business.

By consolidating their customer Slack channels, automating the triage of customer requests, and streamlining escalations, Northflank turned a previously chaotic support operation into a highly efficient, developer-friendly experience. Now, instead of spending time managing disjointed conversations across siloed support channels, their team can focus on delivering world-class support – faster, smarter, and at scale.