Priorities

Priorities help your team focus on what matters most by organizing support threads by urgency. This is especially helpful when volume is high or service levels vary by customer tier.

How to set Priority

You can set a thread’s priority in several ways:

• Press P while viewing a thread

• Use ⌘ + K and search for “Set priority”

• Select from the dropdown menu in the thread header

Available Priority Levels

Plain supports four levels of priority:

• Urgent – Downtime, security threats, data loss

• High – Blocked workflows or time-sensitive issues

• Medium – Standard support requests

• Low – Routine questions or simple follow-ups

Use them consistently across your team to ensure clarity and fast responses.

Automate with Workflow Rules and AI

To save time and improve consistency, you can set priorities automatically using both Workflow Rules and AI urgency detection.

Workflow Rules

Create automation based on metadata like Tier, keywords, or channel:

• Enterprise threads → High

• Messages with “down” or “blocked” → Urgent

• Billing questions → Low

Configure in Settings → Workflow Rules

AI Urgency Detection

Plain uses AI to detect urgency based on message content and auto-assign Urgent when needed. This is great for spotting critical threads without relying on manual triage.

Best Practices

• Pair with SLAs to make sure time-sensitive issues are handled before they breach

• Group views by priority for faster triage

• Combine with labels (e.g. “Bug report” + “Urgent”)

• Use contact forms to prompt urgency input from your customer

You can also filter and sort your queue by priority to stay on top of critical work.