Learn why Prisma migrated from Zendesk to Plain to customize their support stack.

Why we love Prisma

Prisma provides modern data access tools that simplify and enhance database interactions in development projects. It serves as an intermediary layer between applications and databases, providing an intuitive and type-safe API for querying and manipulating data, and more.

Prisma ORM, their first product, launched in 2019, and now boasts a community of hundreds of thousands of monthly active devs. Prisma’s overarching goal is to make application developers more productive when working with databases. Over the past year, Prisma has launched a variety of new products – including Prisma Accelerate, Prisma Pulse, and Prisma Optimize – all aimed at facilitating teams to ship faster, without having to worry about the complexity of interacting with their databases. 

So, what drove the Prisma team to check out a new support platform? 

Prisma’s overall experience with Zendesk was very different from the types of tooling that their team wanted to use. Zendesk is quite an opinionated platform with little opportunity for customization, with a UI that felt clunky, and Prisma felt like Plain was much more aligned with the experience that developers and technical support teams look for. 

Prisma is a startup and a developer tool, and they emphasize the developer experience of their own products very highly. Zendesk didn’t match the experience they wanted out of their support platform, as it felt like more of an old-school solution. As well as this, the concept of being able to think about features in Plain as components and building blocks that can be integrated with existing systems led them to try out the platform. 

Why was Plain the right fit? 

Prisma evaluated a few different platforms alongside Plain – Intercom, Helpscout, Crisp and Front – among others. Ultimately, they chose Plain for the platform’s flexibility, modern UI, and alignment with their own engineering mindset. Plain's component-based structure and extensive API support allowed Prisma to customize their support stack freely and build on top of new features that the Plain team delivered. For example, the Prisma team has used Plain APIs to send support request related data from Plain to Common Room. This connection has allowed their entire team to see a complete history of a user’s interaction with them, all from their profile in Common Room.

The user experience, and developer experience, were both extremely smooth compared to what they were used to with Zendesk. Plain felt like a tool their team would actually enjoy using as a startup and developer tool themselves – and the “UI felt a thousand times better than Zendesk”. 

Migrating to Plain with the Zendesk importer

Prisma were the first Plain customers to use our Zendesk importer, and as one of our first users, they found some great improvements that we could make to the importer to suit their needs. We ended up making updates to the importer together to make sure they were happy with the end result. 

Being the first team to trial a new feature can be scary, and the Prisma team were worried about incorrectly importing thousands of issues, and accidentally re-opening or following up on all those threads. The main thing that Petra appreciated about how Plain handled the migration was that they always got a full explanation on how the Plain team approached their features, which made their team a lot more comfortable with the migration. 

Support at Prisma today 

Today, Prisma ingests support threads for their customers on the Prisma Data Platform through two primary channels: a native in-app form and email. The in-app form, integrated using Plain’s API, maintains Prisma’s branding and UI, offering a seamless experience for customers. Within the form, customers can select the priority of their message – if it’s an outage, the thread will get picked up by Prisma’s support team immediately. If it’s a P1, P2, P3 etc., there are different time constraints and levels of urgency attached to the thread. 

Emails sent to support@prisma.io are also integrated into Plain as new threads. The Prisma team are power-users of Plain’s auto-responders and SLAs. They’ve set up granular SLAs for different tier customers, and they use auto-responders to ensure that expectations on response time are immediately clear after a customer has submitted a request. 

How will support scale over the next year at Prisma? 

As demand for Prisma Data Platform’s support grows, the team is evaluating introducing new support channels over the next year. They foresee setting up ad-hoc Slack Connect channels for certain customers. 

Prisma’s migration to Plain has enhanced their ability to build the support stack that works with them, aligning with their developer-centric approach. We are so excited to see them continue to provide exceptional service as they grow.