Launch HN: Unthread (YC S22) – Customer support, entirely within Slack

Howdy HN! Tom and Jake here from Unthread (https://unthread.io). We make it easy for businesses to manage customer experience (CX) end-to-end inside of Slack. We automatically create tickets for new conversations, handle assignments & escalations, triage with other teams, etc — all without leaving Slack.

Here’s a quick Loom showing how it works: https://www.loom.com/share/8158371d29c84550863adbd6719bb112

Unthread was born out of a failed B2B SaaS startup that we were running for about 2 years. We found clients preferred sending bug reports and feature requests through Slack instead of email or the Intercom widget embedded in our app. This was great for us - Slack is a tool we were already using every day, it’s quick and easy to respond, and it’s less formal than composing an email. The problem is that chat != ticketing, and we struggled to keep track of what needed responses or follow-ups. We used a combination of “mark unread”, “remind me”, and DMs to try to triage, and things still slipped through the cracks.

We started building Unthread to manage our own customers’ requests inside of Slack. After piloting with other companies in our YC batch who were having the same pain point, we decided to pivot to it being our product.

Unthread automatically tracks incoming messages to a channel. We use some basic NLP to determine if it’s an issue or a friendly hello. If it’s an issue, we create a ticket, assign an owner, and send a private message to the assignee that they need to respond. We have an “inbox” in Slack where you can see all of the open conversations that are assigned to you, manage the status of each conversation, and close them out when you're done. If you’re also doing email support, you can forward emails into a Slack channel where reps can compose a response to be sent via email.

The unique approach Unthread takes is that none of this is visible to the end customer. We use a combination of ephemeral messages (only visible to your team) and DMs to keep things private. Customers don’t want to talk to a chatbot, so we help support reps provide real responses to customers by giving them the tools behind the scenes to organize and collaborate.

We also have an escalation system (think PagerDuty for Slack messages) to notify a backup person if there hasn’t been a response in time. You can configure this on a per-customer basis to set shorter SLAs for more valuable accounts, and we’re working on adding rotations of who’s the primary point of contact.

Anyone in the HN community can install the Slack app directly by using this special link: unthread.io/?referral=hn.

We’re excited to hear how this resonates with folks’ current experience using Slack for CX! I imagine there are some opinionated workflows out there :)