Meet Right, a new startup looking to reinvent support tools. While the customer support space is a competitive industry with major tech companies such as intercom and ZendeskPlain believes it takes a different approach as it focuses on API integrations to make your company’s product and your support platform work hand in hand.
Plain has raised a $6 million starting round co-led by Connect Ventures and Index Ventures. Many business angels also joined the round, such as Soleio, Allison Pickens, Nicolas Dessaigne, Matt Robinson, Mike Hudack and Zack Kanter.
According to Plain, a major problem for customer support agents is that there is a mismatch between products and support tickets. They often have to go back and forth between different backend tools. Even if there are some integrations to sync data between the support tool and product data, most of the time information is not synced because it is not retrieved in real time.
While major customer support platforms offer APIs and many customization options, development teams often have different priorities and cannot spend too much time on internal tools. This is especially true for support tools, as they don’t often interact directly with these tools.
Plain’s API strategy works both ways. First, Plain can directly display live customer data in Plain. It calls to the backend to get relevant information such as subscription status, current subscription name, some usage statistics, etc. Data is cached and deleted after a while. If you go back to an old ticket, Plain will fetch live data again.
Second, Plain is highly customizable when it comes to integrating support actions into your product. It doesn’t have to be a chat popup in the bottom right corner of the website. Developers can customize the user interface and create new interactions such as early access requests, product feedback features, and native contact forms.
The startup has tried to make it as painless as possible to start using Plain. The idea is that it shouldn’t slow down development teams. The company believes getting started with Plain is as easy as building a Slackbot.
“The fundamental problem we are solving is context: Plain provides a single source of truth for customer interactions, powered by companies’ own systems and data – so when someone comes into contact with a problem, the company immediately knows who they are, what their order is, what has happened so far — and can solve it in a single click,” co-founder and CEO Simon Rohrbach said in a statement.
Plain does not have the same track record and integration ecosystem as Intercom and Zendesk. But the API-first strategy is interesting, especially if you are a startup building a modern product with many API endpoints.
