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Plain in 10 concepts

Ten concepts connect everything in Plain. Each builds on the ones before it.

1. Thread

A thread is a single customer conversation and the fundamental unit in Plain. Every email, Slack message, Chat session, contact form submission, Microsoft Teams message and Discord question becomes a thread. Threads have a status, priority, owner, labels, custom fields, and a timeline of every event. Workflows, AI, reporting and integrations all operate on threads.

2. Channel

A channel is where threads come from: Slack, Email, Microsoft Teams, Chat, Discord, Contact Forms, Discourse or the Headless Support Portal. Each converts inbound messages into threads by its own rules. Slack ingests selected channels, Email parses incoming mail, and Chat starts a thread per session. Once a thread exists, its channel is a property. Replies post back to the original channel.

3. Customer, Company and Tenant

Plain models the people you support in three layers:

  • Customer: an individual person, the thread author.
  • Company: a group of Customers, matched automatically by domain.
  • Tenant: the contract or account boundary, usually mapped to your CRM's Account or Organization object.

    A Tenant often maps one to one with a Company, but some businesses have several Companies under one contract, or one Company spread across several Tenants. Tenant fields, such as plan, MRR or account manager, and Customer cards add account context to threads.

4. Tier

A Tier is a segment of customers, such as Enterprise, SMB and Self-Serve. Tiers attach to Tenants and Companies and define their level of service. SLAs, escalation paths, routing rules and reporting can all branch on Tier.

5. SLAs and business hours

SLAs are response-time targets, typically first-response and next-response times, defined per Tier. Plain tracks them on every thread, warns you before a breach, and can trigger automation when one is at risk. Business hours control when the SLA clock counts. SLAs respect them by default, so weekends and holidays do not burn through your targets.

6. Statuses, priorities, labels and thread fields

Any of these thread attributes can drive workflows, routing, assignment and reporting:

  • Status: Todo, which covers Needs First Response, Needs Next Response, Investigating and Close the Loop; Snoozed, which covers Waiting for Customer and Paused for Later; Done; or Ignored.
  • Priority: Urgent, High, Normal or Low, independent of SLA.
  • Labels: categorical tags you create, such as Bug, Billing or Feature Request.
  • Thread fields: typed custom fields for structured data per thread.

7. Assignment and escalation paths

Assignment is who owns a thread right now: a person, a team with load balancing, or no one. Escalation paths are predefined sequences of people or teams a thread moves through if it is not resolved in time.

8. Workflows

A workflow is an event, then conditions, then actions. An event is something happening to a thread: created, replied to, label added, SLA at risk. Conditions are checks like Tier equals X, channel is Slack, or an AI prompt matches. Actions include assigning to a team, setting priority, sending an auto-response or escalating. Workflows encode your team's playbook so threads route themselves.

9. AI agents in Plain

Plain ships with three AI agent surfaces:

  • Ari: a customer-facing agent that resolves questions in your Help Center and Chat using your knowledge sources, and hands off to a human when it cannot.
  • Sidekick: a team-facing assistant that drafts replies and summarizes threads.
  • Bring Your Own Agent: connect Inkeep, Parahelp, Decimal, Duckie or any custom agent.

    All of them draw on your knowledge sources, such as Help Center articles, public docs and custom URLs, and respect your configured tone of voice.

10. Help Center

Your Help Center is the customer-facing surface for three things:

  • Knowledge base: published articles organized into groups.
  • Ask AI: Ari answering questions in natural language, grounded in your knowledge base.
  • Customer Inbox: where customers submit, track and reply to support requests across all channels.

    You can run several Help Centers from one workspace, for example a public docs site, a customer-only portal and an internal team knowledge base. They all feed the same support queue.

    To start setting up, continue to the Quickstart.