In any customer support tool, you spend the majority of your time helping customers. So it’s crucial that you have a smooth flow to go from one customer to the next – particularly when you're just trying to clear out a queue.
Until now, in Plain, this took too many clicks, too much navigating back and forth, and too much thinking. Little things like these quickly add up. It was time for us to change this, so over the past month we've been hard at work building the next iteration of our queue.
We're affectionately calling it Magiqueue™️, because it really feels like magic - and we're excited to share it with you today.
Keeping context 💫
The first major change is that your queue now stays with you as you help customers, so you always know who to help next. This, combined with automatically guiding you to the next customer in the queue when you mark someone as helped, means it now takes 67% less clicks every time you help someone.
This also makes triage super speedy. Open up a customer from the waiting for help queue. Open an issue with I and quickly move to the next in line with J.
Focusing on flow 🌊
The second change is that the transition from queue to timeline now happens seamlessly, rather than feeling like a hard page refresh. Navigating back and forth between customers now feels buttery smooth, powered by Framer Motion.
Improving information hierarchy 🔢
Finally, we took this opportunity to tidy up how we display customers in a queue. We wanted to use the space more efficiently, be more mobile friendly, and overall, be a little extra crispy.
And this is just the beginning. Over the next few months, we’re diving deep into our core workflow to make helping customers in Plain absolutely magical. Keep an eye out for new things to come 👀.
In the meantime… go discover some magic 💫
✨ Small but important improvements
- Added a new optional Slack notification in case you want to be notified of all messages from customers that you are assigned to.
- Made several small visual improvements to the timeline.
- You can now mark customers as spam from both the customer page and command palette. When you mark a customer as spam, they will be hidden from queues, but their emails will continue to be processed and stored in the background.
- Many, many, and I mean many performance improvements to our API. Things should feel a lot snappier now!
- When filtering, you can see how many of the total number of customers in a queue are displayed.
- Notes are visually more distinct so that it’s easier to tell them apart from emails and chats.
- We now automatically redirect you to the last workspace you visited so you don’t have to select a workspace every time you log in.
🐛 Bugs squashed
- We have improved how we handle emails from Google groups and squashed a few edge-case bugs.
- Fixed a bug which resulted in some keyboard shortcuts still being enabled even when an action was disabled.
- Fixed a few visual issues with our Linear linking UI which resulted in some clipping.