How Plain is reshaping customer support (w/ head of community Susana de Sousa)

Susana de Sousa leads Community at Plain, an AI-native customer support platform used by teams at Cursor, Raycast, Granola, and n8n.

We spoke to Susana about why she thinks the old customer support playbook is dying and why 2026 might be the year of the support engineer.

Susana is a true veteran in the customer support space. She drew on her experience at Airbnb and Loom to explain how support leaders should orient themselves at a time when the tools, expectations, and roles are all changing at once.

Catch the full conversation on YouTube, or read our notes below.

It's a special time to be working in customer support

Support is going through a generational shift. The tools of the trade are changing, and the expectations placed on support leaders are changing even faster. Susana describes this moment as one of both uncertainty and opportunity:

“It's a very, very special time to be working in customer support. The old playbook is dying, or maybe it's already dead. And the new one isn't fully written yet. There's a million opportunities, there's a lot of excitement for the possibilities.”

But that excitement sits alongside real tension. Support leaders are feeling two distinct kinds of pressure:

Personal/job pressure:

With the tools changing so rapidly, there is a growing sense of anxiety among support teams, especially junior members, around the future of their role.

“We have the job anxiety bucket.. being afraid of losing your job or maybe not even knowing what your job is going to look like in the future.”

Executive pressure:

For support leaders, the pressure is coming from further up the org chart. The C-suite wants to make sure their support teams are leveraging the latest tools to boost resolution rates, and bolster customer success.

“There's a different bucket, which is the executive pressure, right? So if everyone else is doing this, then we should too. And that's typically like not the best approach to adopting new technology.”

While these tensions are inevitable given the rate of change, Susana outlined some frameworks for support leaders to help their teams transition better. Let's talk about a few:

“Support isn’t just about replying to tickets”

On LinkedIn, Susana wrote:

“Support isn't about replies to tickets. It's about removing the need for them.”

This frames support teams as proactive contributors, and not solely reactive. With AI taking care of the low leverage work, support teams can actually use their time and energy to solve high leverage problems - the kinds that if solved, will remove the need for tickets in the first place.

For instance, when she worked at Loom, she stopped seeing tickets as tasks and started treating them as upstream signals:

“Every question was a signal. My job really wasn't to answer the question, but it was to make sure that the question never needed to be asked again.”

This narrative shift may seem obvious, but is not how most support teams are perceived within companies.

AI won’t fix a broken foundation

Support has lived through multiple hype cycles: automations, self-serve portals, live chat, proactive messaging, support ops. Now AI is the latest wave, and leaders feel pressure to adopt it whether they’re ready or not. Susana has seen this pattern for a decade:

“We've had automations, self-serve, live chat. They've all had their moment. We've been talking about reactive to proactive mindset shift for years. Support operations started to become a thing, and now everything must be AI.”

But AI only works if the underlying foundation works. If documentation is outdated, or workflows are ambiguous, AI will simply accelerate the chaos.

“You can't just slap AI on top of broken products and, and hope for the best.”

Before teams deploy a chatbot or build an agent, she encourages them to fix the basics: documentation, routing, ticket quality, instrumentation, and product health. AI amplifies whatever already exists - good or bad.

There’s no silver bullet in customer support

Susana is allergic to blanket advice. Every business has a different approach to customer support, and will inevitably have different needs.

“There is no one solution [that] fits every single business. Every single support team is different, much less the product or the business.”

Her approach is to work backward from the ideal state. What are some desired outcomes, and what are the systems that will get the team there? She pushes leaders to ask very specific questions:

“What would our success look like if we did X instead of Y? If we removed x% of technical issues, what would our contact rate look like?”

How to actually partner with engineering

In Susana's experience, the most effective customer support teams almost always have strong interdependent relationships with the engineering team.

"One thing that I like to ask is how can I make my engineering team's life easier?"

Communication between support and engineering is critical, especially because both teams are often working towards different objectives.

“We're working in different realities, right? We have different metrics, we have different goals, we have different systems.”

If the lines of communication aren't strong, engineering teams end up associating the support team with high-stress, reactive tasks:

“I feel like engineers really only hear from support when things go wrong, right?”

To counter this, she drew on her experience at Loom again, where her team tried to act as multipliers, instead of problem-bearers. She encourages support teams to pick up the technical skills necessary to proactively go and solve issues if possible, and if not, at least do the leg work to make engineering's job easier.

“They would go into any troubleshooting with the goal of. Not just like fixing the issue, but like actually fixing the issue forever.”

Zooming out, she also recommends support and engineering leaders to sit down and figure out where their metrics and goals overlap, to actually incentivize better collaboration.

2026: the year of the support engineer

Susana thinks the support role will become increasingly technical, especially as AI takes on the repetitive, low leverage work.

“AI is taking the tier one type of work. What's left is more technical, more complex.”

That doesn’t mean everyone in support must become full-time engineers of course, but the directional trend is clear:

“Companies are realizing that they need their support teams to become more technical, and I truly believe that this is going to be a role that's going to truly define how modern support gets done.”

Learning technical skills has never been easier

Susana started this year feeling boxed out of the “builder” world. But with the current set of vibe coding tools, she quickly figured out how to do basic stuff that she might have called an engineer for in the past. She encourages every support leader to dabble with the tools and try things. Picking up technical skills has never been easier.

“I started this year having no idea how to deploy like my own website, work with databases like, you know, pull data from an API and now I'm doing all of that just because. Technology evolved in such a way where people that are non-technical, such as myself. Um, can do that and can access that, that power.”

Her advice to her younger self (and to today’s support leaders) is about how you think, not which tool you use:

“Try to learn as much as possible about, you know. Systems thinking about, um, thinking about a problem in different ways… figuring out the steps towards a solution really teaches you how to think creatively as well.”

Actionable takeaways for support leaders

• Support isn't about replies to tickets. It's about removing the need for them.
• Make every question a signal and aim to make sure that the question never needed to be asked again.
• Fix foundations first: product quality, docs, routing, and support ops, because AI is not going to help you if your foundations aren't right.
• Reject blanket solutions. There's no one solution fits every single business.
• Show up as a multiplier for engineering. Start by asking “how can I make my engineering team's life easier?”
• As a leader, invest in support engineers. Pick up technical skills yourself. It's never been easier.
• Build systems thinking and creative problem solving as durable skills, regardless of the latest buzzy tool.

We couldn't agree more with Susana when she said “It’s a very, very special time to be working in customer support.” The old playbook may be dead, but if you get the foundations and the partnerships right, the next one is for the best support teams to write.

We had a great time jamming Susana - we're looking to have similar conversations with support leaders to understand how their playbooks are evolving with AI. Sound like you? Drop us a note 🍓