Get started with Plain
Welcome to Plain – the support platform built for collaborative, quickly scaling B2B teams. We help you provide fast, high-quality support that scales with your product and customers, without sacrificing a personal touch.
This guide walks you through setup, best practices, and the “why” behind key features so you can hit the ground running.
Your onboarding checklist:
Create your workspace to get started.
You will need a team member with Google Workspace or Slack admin access to help you set up your workspace and connect to either email or Slack.
1. Invite your team
Support shouldn't be a stand alone part of the company – it should be collaborative, high-touch, and integrated into every part of your company – from support, to success, and engineering. To get started, make sure everyone at your company has access to Plain.
Go to Settings → Members
Invite teammates by email
Viewer seats in Plain are free, which means that you can invite your whole company to Plain to provide transparency on customer requests.
2. Turn on Plain AI
Our AI features are integrated into every aspect of the product. In order to leverage AI throughout the rest of the workspace, you first have to opt-in. You can read more about our use of Open AI here.
Go to Settings → Plain AI
Opt in to all of the Plain AI features that you'll be interested in using.
3. Set up your customer channels
Meet your customers where they are – without duplicating work.
Slack
Go to Settings → Slack.
Select the ingestion mode that works best for you.
Add the naming convention your company uses for customer channels (i.e.
ext-customername-company) so that the Plain bot can auto-join all relevant Slack channels.Add your Slack Discussion channels for internal collaboration.
Slack Connect = Customer threads
Internal channels = Discussions
Follow the setup guide to enable your support email address to be able to receive and send emails via Plain.
You can set up multiple email addresses (help@plain.com, security@plain.com, etc.).
Set up your shared inbox (Google Admin required)
For more information on how to set up additional channels, click on the links below:
Plain makes all these channels first-class and unifies them in a single support queue so you can ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
4. Set up your Help Center
Plain's AI-powered Help Center brings everything together, giving your customers one place to find answers, ask questions, and talk to your team. It’s the connective tissue of your entire support operations.
Click on your workspace name at the top left corner of the sidebar and navigate to Help Center.
Set up your Help Center's security permissions, subdomain (
yourcompany.support.site) and add your logo and brand colors.Create your first group and your first articles.
Features that can help you build out your Help Center faster than ever before:
Edit with AI: Highlight text and click on the sparkle emoji to edit your draft articles using AI.
Generate Help Center article from your queue: Click CMD + K from any support request to generate a help center article as you're responding to customers.
5. Configure Your Notifications
Set up Slack notifications so your team has singular place to stay notified of new customer requests, upcoming SLAs breaches, or a high-level summary of the open requests. Go to Settings → Notifications → Slack
Go to Settings → Slack notifications
Toggle on any of the notifications you'd like to receive.
Our Slack Digests are great for keeping your team on top of the health of your queue in Slack. The Daily Digest gives you a snapshot of assignment and the Daily Summary gives you a qualitative analysis of your queue. Both are perfect for staying informed and catching issues early.
6. Define Tiers and SLAs
Segment your customers so you can address the most pressing issues first. Plain's Tiers and SLAs help you to set clear expectations with customers and scale easily as you grow.
Go to Settings → Business Hours to set up your company's business hours and then navigate to Settings → Tiers.
Define your Tiers (i.e. Enterprise, SMB, Self-Serve)
Assign first response time and next response time SLAs per Tier.
Plain enforces SLAs and will display the remaining time you have left directly in your queue. You can also set up Slack notifications so you receive notice before an SLA is about to breach.
7. Connect the rest of your tooling stack
Break down walls between support, product, and sales by integrating the rest of your tooling into Plain.
Linear / Jira / Shortcut: Link threads directly to engineering tickets to track bugs or feature requests.
When the ticket is closed out in the engineering platform, it will automatically remind you to close the loop with the customer in Plain.
CRMs: Sync your Companies and Contacts to Plain from your CRM so you can structure them in the right Tier and priority level.
Incident Management: Connect incident.io to Plain so you can track ongoing incidents with incoming support requests.
Migrate from your old support platform: Connect to Intercom, Zendesk, Helpscout, or Front importers to bring over all your requests from your legacy system.
8. Create labels and set up your workflow automations.
Categorize incoming requests without any clicks and set up workflow rules to auto-triage to make you faster than ever before.
Go to Settings → Labels. Set up 5-10 labels to categorize your support requests. Common examples:
Billing
Bug
Feature Request
If you have turned on our auto-labeling feature, these labels will automatically be applied to any incoming support request.
Go to Settings → Workflow Rules to enable automated actions to correctly route support requests based on Tier, Company, Account Owner, Label, and much more.
9. Personalize Plain to you
The final step is customizing Plain to your way of working. Here are a few things to get started:
Create and favorite Views (e.g. by tier, status, assignee) so you can filter to the support requests you care about.
Set up personal email/Slack notifications by navigating to Preferences (bottom right of the sidebar).
10. Explore our API
You can use Plain to provide great support to your customers without ever writing a line of code. But we also have a powerful API to integrate Plain even further into your product. Here's how to get started:
Knowledge Sources: Index your help center for smarter AI replies
We’re here to help you give great support to your customers. Email help@plain.com with any questions as you're getting set up!