Overview
In Plain, every customer conversation lives in a thread. Thread Management is the set of tools that determine what happens to those threads: how they move through your workflow, who’s responsible for them, how urgently they need attention, and how your team organizes and tracks them from arrival to resolution.
The thread lifecycle
Every thread has a status to show you exactly where it is in your workflow at a glance. New threads are created with Needs first response; once you reply, they move to Needs next response. You can snooze a thread while waiting on the customer, move it to Investigating for deeper internal work, and mark it Done when resolved. Statuses drive your SLA timers. Plain tracks first and next response time commitments per thread and you can configure alerts for your team before a breach occurs.
Read about statuses → Read about SLAs →
Structuring your queue
Plain gives you several tools to help bring order to chaos.
Priorities: (Urgent, High, Medium, Low) flag which threads need attention first.
Tiers let you segment your customers based on your internal (or external) criteria. Such as pricing plans like Enterprise, Pro or Free. You can then attach different SLA targets to each.
Labels can categorize threads by type and enable team based assignment and routing.
Thread fields go further still, letting you store structured custom data like renewal dates, deal values and account IDs with the thread. That your team can then use to filter, sort, and build workflows on.
Priorities → Tiers → Labels → Thread fields →
Assignment
Plain assigns a thread to you automatically when you start typing, or you can assign manually with A. For larger teams, load-balancing distributes incoming threads across available agents based on current workload and availability status. When something needs escalating, escalation paths give your team a predefined route to the next level so there’s no guessing who to pull in.
Assignment → Load-balancing → Escalation paths →
Keeping work moving
Tasks let you track internal follow-ups without leaving Plain. Press T to create one on any thread. Auto-responses keep customers informed the moment a thread arrives, configurable by channel, business hours, or label. When two threads cover the same issue, merging them into a single parent avoids duplicated effort. And when a conversation is genuinely closed, locking it prevents further replies while automatically creating a fresh thread if the customer writes back.
Tasks → Auto-responses → Merging threads → Locking threads →