Plain is a customer support platform for modern tools. Let users reach you from anywhere in your product, in any format. View product interactions and messages in a single timeline, and get real-time information from your own systems right at your fingertips.
Plain is one of the best support tools our team has ever used. They're highly customizable, their API is full-featured so we could bake the support experience right into Glue, and the team is incredibly responsive to our needs. Highly recommend.
Plain is just getting started and we already migrated all customer communications over to them. Such a fresh new view at how customer support and communication should be done. They've been extremely open and helpful when it comes to questions about the product and suggestions. Have loved working with them so far!
Hi Product Hunt - and thanks for the hunt, @chrismessina ! 👋
This is Simon, Co-Founder & CEO of Plain.com. We're launching our our product into open beta today and our team is so excited to finally share what we've built with you.
We started Plain because we wanted to solve the problem of context. If you've ever dealt with a customer support query, you know what I'm talking about: Figuring out who this customer is, whether they mentioned that bug before, the detective work to find what plan they're on, understanding what happened right before they get in touch... across a dozen tabs and apps. So we set out to build a modern tool that let users talk to you from anywhere in your product, let you see everything in one place, and importantly was a joy to use!
Some things we think you'll like:
💬 Email and chat out of the box for instant setup
💌 Structured messaging anywhere in your product. Power things like early access requests, bug reports, product feedback – all in one place.
👀 View product events and messages in a single timeline. Plain can display any event from your own tools and systems, in any format, using our powerful JSON schema.
🚤 Get live customer information from your own tools and systems right in Plain, without building clunky apps or syncing custom fields.
✨ ...and everything you'd expect from a modern productivity tool: A beautiful, fast and intuitive UI, Cmd+K support, usage-based pricing, and much more.
We love Product Hunt so are excited to offer the community 50% off our paid plans for the first 3 months if you sign up this week. Since we charge based on usage and have a generous free tier, this discount will only kick in once you exceed our free tier, so happy supporting! 🙌 Simply select "Product Hunt" when asked how you heard about us and we'll do the rest. 💛
We can't wait to hear what you think.
@simonrohrbach very cool. In my last company (Hotjar) we used Zendesk, which required a TON of custom work - so much so that we had to have a team of engineers dedicated full time simply to keep up with the needs of our Support team. It was painful for Support, but it was also painful for Product & Engineering, because the nature of the work to build on Zendesk was pretty soul-sucking 🙈 So happy to see a product come to life with the potential to pull the rug out from under that outdated model! 👏
I've had the privilege of seeing Plain evolve from its earliest concepts to where it is today. The development momentum has been remarkable, and truly grounded in a thoughtful and first-principles approach to answering the question: what should modern customer support tooling look like for 2022? The answer is Plain.
The team have really got to the heart of what a modern customer support team needs to connect the dots across their business and deliver an effortless customer experience. Well done! I can't wait to see what's next
Thanks @jamie_edwards and thank you for all of your help and advice on the way!
Report
I'm really proud to be backing Plain and its founders Simon Rohrbach and Matt Vagni. I had the great pleasure of working with both Simon and Matt at Deliveroo and they're amazing people.
At Deliveroo we all learned, together, about the importance of customer support tooling. It happened during a period of hyper-growth when our customer service capabilities were just totally overwhelmed. This led to insanely high cost combined with bad customer outcomes -- a really dangerous combination.
We couldn't hire new CS reps fast enough and so we did the only thing we could do -- we built better tooling. A small team went into lockdown and totally transformed our systems and processes, allowing us to regain control of customer support experience and cost.
Plain is born from this experience. It's a tool designed to help other companies do customer service correctly from the beginning and invest in efficiency and tooling at the right times. And hopefully avoid ever getting into that sticky situation. Or at least make it much faster and easier to get out of than it was for us all those years ago.
I'm really proud to be an investor in Plain. Congratulations Simon and Matt on an important milestone and a great product in the making.
Thank you so much @mikehudack. Both Matt and I have learned an incredible amount from you – lessons we continue to hold dear and apply every day at Plain. We're really grateful to have you as a supporter and investor!
We're extremely excited about Plain – we committed to being a customer in the very early days, and we were so impressed with the product and vision that I made an angel investment as well. A modular, API-first platform is desperately needed in this space and Plain's attention to detail is exactly what is required in order to execute here.
For companies our size getting granular feedback in real time is super difficult - very few successful or unsuccessful interactions result in users taking the time to send off a chat message and the 'ticket -> response' format feels a bit like going from a stories and steams world back to a sms messaging world.
Plain is so exciting because its starting to fix all this. We can't wait to use it. Congrats!
@markvertra Totally agree! Tickets feel so weird and old-school these days. They don't at all map to how people think of their relationship with a company and mostly just feel like something that's there to satisfy some technical system.
Really happy to hear Plain resonates, let me know if I can help get you set-up at all!
Two years ago, we needed a tool to handle customer support at Medito , and we tried a few solutions, such as Hubspot, Google Groups, and Front, but they didn't match our needs.
We wanted an easy and simple tool to understand, removing the concept of "tickets" and giving us a clear overview of our user's / donors' support and donation history.
We have been using Plain for a while now and can't be happier.
We have seen the product evolve and improve within a few months, and integrating with it has been very easy (which is good for us because we don't have a lot of funds and time to do that).
Additionally, the lovely team and @simonrohrbach@mattvagni are amazing Founders, always happy to receive feedback and challenge things.
We haven't had a chance to try out the Customer Cards yet, but I know our team has been excited about the feature since Plain announced it. ✨
I can't wait to see where Plain goes and am happy to be part of this journey as one of their early adopters ❤️
@scouech , thank you so munch for all your support since the very early days! You've been super generous with feedback, and patient while we fixed issues and iterated on features - we couldn't imagine better customers than you. We're so grateful to have you on board 🙏
The idea of displaying all user interaction with the product and messages in one timeline is awesome. This is something that is sorely lacking in ticketing systems like Zendesk, Freshdesk and others.
Congrats on the launch!
Plain
Ourspace
Plain
Plain
Kayako
Plain
Plain
Serverless SFTP
Plain
Ourspace
Plain
Medito
Plain
WayAway