Customer Experience News is a weekly newsletter about the most important news and discussions for Customer Experience and Customer Support Leaders.
This is all the weekly news you need in around 5 minutes.
Our main story today is about Notion’s launch of Custom Agents and what it means for Customer Support leaders.
Notion: Custom Agents and Library
Notion, the all-in-one workspace platform, launched Custom Agents this week. These are autonomous agents that run on triggers or schedules without manual prompting, and connect to Slack, Notion Mail, Calendar, and external tools via MCP (Model Context Protocol), the open standard that allows AI systems to connect to third-party platforms.
Operational Impact:
For support teams already operating in Notion, the two most immediately relevant capabilities are task routing and Q&A. Task routing agents capture incoming requests, convert them into tickets, and route to the right owner across Slack and Notion simultaneously. Remote’s IT Ops team reported their agent triages with over 95% accuracy, autonomously resolves more than 25% of tickets, and saves 20 hours per week. Q&A agents handle repeat questions by pulling from internal knowledge bases, Slack history, and documentation — shifting Support Specialists from answering questions to auditing responses and improving agent performance.
Caroline Huynh from Notion shares how she has it connected with her Slack, email and calendar. It summarizes emails, pulls out action items, triages for me and reminds her when she hasn’t replied to someone.
James Nonu-Carling from Nifty shares how it goes through the weekly signals on Sundays (meetings, notes, tasks, slacks, emails, etc) and adds the most important insights to a doc. This way, Mondays are organized.
Tim Jeffries and Jerwin Parker host a webinar, breaking down the triggers, activity logs, integrations, and what is actually working to reduce admin overhead.
Implementation Considerations:
How far these agents reach into your support stack depends on which helpdesks have published MCP servers.
| Platform | MCP Status |
|---|---|
| Intercom | Official server in production (US-hosted workspaces only) |
| Zendesk | MCP client in early access |
| Help Scout | Community-built server on GitHub |
| Plain | No published MCP server |
| Pylon | No published MCP server |
Teams without clean, structured knowledge bases will find these agents amplify their disorganization, not fix it. Custom Agents are free through May 3, 2026, after which they require Notion credits as a paid add-on for Business and Enterprise plans.
Separately, Notion released Library — a dedicated full-page view for organizing workspace content. Teamspaces, Recents, Favorites, Private pages, and Shared pages each get their own tab. Teams can slim down the sidebar to daily-use items and let everything else live in Library, accessible when needed, out of the way when not.
Intercom: AI titles, identity verification, and Slack side conversations
Intercom, a customer service and AI Agent platform, shipped a series of updates this week. The Messenger now generates AI-powered titles for every conversation based on the customer’s first message, visible in both the Messenger list and Inbox attributes, so teammates get context at a glance without opening the thread. UI improvements also landed alongside this: cleaner layout, last-sender visibility, and readable timestamps.
On the workflow side, teams can now verify a customer’s identity directly within a Workflow using an Email OTP step. A 6-digit code is sent to the email on file, and the workflow branches on success or failure. No human handoff is required to confirm who you’re talking to.
Finally, Slack side conversations are now available from within the Inbox. Teammates can loop in internal Slack channels without leaving Intercom, with replies syncing back to the parent conversation automatically.
Help Scout: WhatsApp, availability-based routing, and automatic PII redaction
Help Scout, a customer service platform, announced a series of inbox updates this week that will be generally available March or April. WhatsApp is now a supported channel. Conversations route through the same shared inbox, automation, and workflows as every other channel.
Routing now factors in teammate availability. Conversations only assign to teammates set to Active; switching to Away pauses new assignments and removes the teammate from rotation until they return. This keeps workloads balanced without manual intervention.
The inbox also now automatically redacts sensitive customer PII as conversations happen. Access can be granted when needed, and retention settings follow existing policies behind the scenes.
GitBook: Reusable content previews, custom icons, and editor improvements
GitBook, an AI-native documentation platform for technical teams, shipped a set of editor improvements this week. A new menu now appears when you select reusable content from a space’s Library, giving you a read-only but interactive preview. From the same menu, you can rename or delete the content without navigating away.
Hint blocks now support custom icons with over 4,300 options in the picker.
Additional editor improvements include stepper block splitting and merging, larger drag-and-drop targets, easier toggling of conditional content blocks, and code block preferences that now persist when you create a new one.
Plain: Visual Workflow Builder
Plain, an AI-powered customer support platform, launched a visual Workflow Builder. Teams can now create multi-step, branching automations on a canvas. Picking triggers (manual or event-based), adding conditions that branch on thread properties, customer data, or AI evaluation, and chaining actions like assignments, priority changes, messages, labels, or HTTP requests.
Wait steps support pausing for minutes, hours, or days, with early cancellation if conditions change. Existing workflow rules were auto-migrated into the new builder.
Pluno: Sidebar content now displayed in your team’s language
Pluno, an AI Agent platform, now displays sidebar content in your team’s configured language, regardless of the language the ticket was submitted in.
Support teams operating across multiple languages no longer need to toggle or manually translate the sidebar context they rely on to work a ticket.
DeepL: 106 target languages now discoverable via API
DeepL, a global communications and translation platform, expands its languages endpoint to support 101 source languages and 106 target languages. The languages were already supported for translation.
This update improves automatic discoverability for API clients so integrations can surface the full range without custom workarounds.
HubSpot: Breeze Customer Agent gets safer rollouts, tighter controls, and better answers
HubSpot, a CRM suite and help desk platform, shipped a batch of updates to Breeze, their AI Customer Agent, focused on safer rollouts, tighter controls, and answer quality.
A Reply Recommendations mode lets the agent draft responses for team approval before anything goes out, which most teams are using as a bridge before enabling fully automated responses.
On the channel side, teams can now configure the agent differently by email behavior: automated email detection filters out out-of-office replies, notifications, and promotional blasts before the agent responds to them. Inline citations link directly to source articles within email replies. Email ignore lists let teams block specific senders from agent interactions entirely.
Rollout controls now support time-based scheduling and customer segmentation, so teams can limit the agent to off-hours or specific customer tiers. Answer quality improvements include better email formatting and the ability to pull accurate data from product catalogs stored in spreadsheets. Source Performance Reporting shows which help articles are driving successful resolutions.
Now this is:
Strategic Support for CX Leaders.
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The list is long, the queue is getting longer, and you don’t have time to step back and think about CX strategically.
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