Quickstart

Everything you need to start using Plain.

Plain is the support platform for B2B technical teams. Everything you need to help your customers in a modern, fast, and opinionated platform.

This quickstart will walk you through how to start helping customers and get the most out of Plain.

The basics

Create a workspace

Everything within Plain happens in a workspace. To create a workspace for your team, sign up at https://app.plain.com and click Create a workspace.

Set up your channels

There are three ways to receive questions in Plain – email, contact forms or Slack.

Email – When you create a workspace you will be guided through email set-up automatically. For more information on how it works check out the docs

Contact forms (Optional) – Forms are a great way to offer support at scale. Use these instructions to set up a form or a floating widget.

Slack - Our Slack integration lets you sync messages from selected Slack channels to Plain and respond directly to customers from the platform. Find out more here.

Invite your team members

To add team members to your Plain workspace and assign roles, navigate to Settings → Members in your workspace. You can add your entire team to Plain for free - we’ll only charge you for users that actively send messages to customers.

Set up notifications

To be notified of new support requests, set up notifications.

We recommend, as a minimum, setting up one shared Slack or Discord channel where new support requests are posted. We also recommend setting up personal notifications so you can be notified of new replies and activity on threads you are assigned to.

Connect your Linear workspace

Connecting your Linear workspace to Plain will let you quickly and seamlessly log bugs and feature requests to Linear without leaving Plain and then close the loop with the customer once they’re completed.

You can connect to Linear from Settings → Linear.

Speed up your workflow

Add labels

Labels are a lightweight but powerful way to categorize threads in Plain. You can configure the labels that make sense for you in Settings → Labels.

Add labels

Set up snippets

Snippets are templated messages that allow you to pull common language to message customers more quickly. You can configure them in Settings → Snippets

Set up snippets

Learn keyboard shortcuts

We make it easy to fly through your workflow without ever needing to use a mouse. Learn about our keyboard shortcuts here. We’ve also added hints throughout the app on which keyboard shortcuts to use.

View all shortcuts

Adding context

To provide support more quickly, get more context into Plain from your own systems.

Add customer cards

Customer cards let you show live information from your own systems in Plain. This lets you bring important, business-specific context to Plain and makes it even easier to help customers without jumping through different tabs.

Set up customer cards

Log key events

Events let you log important customer actions, errors, releases, and other key events to Plain. This gives you the full picture in the context of a support request as to what happened and why.

Set up events

Explore our API

Plain is built API first so that you can build countless other use cases into your support stack.

Learn more about our API and make your first API call.

Feedback & questions

If you have any feedback on our docs, we’d love to hear it! Open an issue straight in Github or drop us an email at [e-mail] and an engineer on the team will help you.